


i don’t like your kingdom keys

by timelykey



Category: The Magicians (TV), The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: Background Relationships, Because fuck canon, Depression, Dom/sub Undertones, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Minor Character Death, Multi, Not Canon Compliant, Past Rape/Non-con, Recovery, Summer, Thesis stress, detailed warning in the notes, gratuitous use of portals, lighthouse holiday, no fillory au, summer vacation with portals, the second year they never had, the tags make this sound super heavy but it's actually extremely soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 06:02:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20204920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/timelykey/pseuds/timelykey
Summary: Quentin learns to ask for what he wants. Eliot gets to be braver, in his own time, on his own terms.‘To your first year at Brakebills and our very last year of deadly peril, Q,’ Eliot says with a smile. He drinks from the bottle, his sun-warmed throat dancing in the lights, and holds the bottle out to Quentin.





	i don’t like your kingdom keys

**Author's Note:**

> No-Fillory AU (with some appearances by Fillory characters). The questers have a lovely summer full of sex and travelling to recover from a horrible year and then study for a degree. As per usual, I’m handwaving a lot to get to this scenario but fuck it (and canon). I didn’t want to erase all of the development we see in the show timeline, but I kind of wanted to take them a couple of steps in a different possible (maybe healthier?) direction away from that starting point. 
> 
> This starts with a lot more sex than I meant to write in pt1, and a lot less than I meant to in pts 2 & 3. 
> 
> Warnings  
Please heed the tags. This is - I hope - a very happy and soft fic generally, but it does discuss and allude to some of the heavier topics covered in canon, at canon-typical levels. 
> 
> (Discussion of past mortal peril, suicide attempt, rape, death/grief. Also discussion of a previous exploration of kink that didn't go well - past pain play/humiliation referenced specifically, past self-harm specifically referenced at that part.)
> 
> Massive thanks to the queliot fic discord & ramblingsofaqueerwoman for soundboarding & reading bits of this in advance. Any mistakes are my own.

_summer: call me friend but keep me closer _

‘El, we can’t just fuck off through a portal -’

‘Sure we can, look, it’s right there.’

Okay, Quentin can’t fault him that one. It is right there. Italy. To be exact, Palermo. 

‘Come _ on, _Quentin,’ Eliot says. He’s tugging at his arm like a very insistent walking tour guide, talking about the B&B with a portal in a linen closet. 

Also - 

‘Look,’ Eliot says slowly, with a tone of one about to impart a great and awful secret, ‘there’s this museum I like.’

Quentin crosses his arms across his chest and raises an eyebrow. He’s not outright suspicious of Eliot trying to goad him into a weekend away from Brakebills and their remedial reading with _ museums _, because El’s as much of a smart nerd as the rest of them, but it wouldn’t have been his first bet. Eliot keeps surprising him like that. 

‘Hear me out. It’s right under a boutique hotel. Tiny place, total hidden gem. _ Exactly _ the kind of niche interest you can appreciate.’ 

Quentin realises with a start that he’s being slowly walked towards the portal with his elbow, and that of his own volition, he’s picked up a backpack with a change of clothes and the essentials in it that he packed, drunkenly, in case Eliot won the argument they started over drinks last night. 

‘What’s in this museum?’ His voice might be flat but Eliot crows like he’s won a prize and starts talking with his expansive, elegant hands. 

‘Okay, so it’s floor tiles, but they’re _ art, _you’re going to love it -’

‘Oh, like the -’

‘That illustration you showed me, with the -’ 

They bring back a tasteful set of miniature Italian floor tiles with magnets on the back and put them on the fridge door. 

\--- 

Palermo is the first trip but not the last. It turns out Eliot has a fondness for Europe and Europe has a fondness for portals, so that’s mostly where they go. They also jump around a ton of major US cities for shit like brunch and ‘you have to try this coffee, Q, no we can’t get in New York.’

Eliot claims that the Europe network has to do with magical provisions in various post-war treaties in the early twentieth century, which sparks a massive geek out from Quentin about parallels in the Fillory books and post-1945 literature. 

They always come back to the cottage after a couple of days, max, to check in with the others. Quentin should question it more, the way the cottage and the group are starting to feel like home. 

At the end of term, when they all slowly realised _ they didn’t have homes to go back to, _Fogg seemed torn between wanting rid of them for eternity and wanting to never let them out of range of his witty one-liners again. 

They’ve got new tattoos between their shoulder blades that itch and burn in the night sometimes, and, according to Eliot, the tattoos very much did not go through the exacting design process he’d have liked to enforce if he got one. But they’re alive - all of them.

Sunderland intervenes while Fogg drinks. She tells them to homeschool themselves on what they missed while they were trying not to die and to ask the school librarians if they need anything. They’re also told to make themselves useful by not trashing the cottage for five whole minutes. Sunderland is bright-eyed as she says it, though, and pauses in front of them to just _ look _ before she leaves. 

Nobody seems keen to leave the safety of Brakebills and the cottage for the summer after the year they’ve had. Had. Survived. Whatever they’re calling it this week. So they just … don’t, by silent group agreement. They all take plenty of day trips and weekends away, or else they’d kill each other and even Penny says that’s a waste of all of their hard work. 

Despite protesting that they aren’t his friends, Penny zaps in and out to steal coffee from their kitchen from the Psychics Cottage like it’s next door, and Quentin cycles over there to tell the other cottage when there’s Group Activities. 

(If he’s relieved that Penny and Kady and Julia are now sharing a whole cottage with no one else to hear them have sex in the various pairings and groupings they appear to be settling into, he keeps it to himself. Julia’s happy, and they love her and treat her with a kind of care and respect Q can appreciate, and that’s all Q is asking of anyone there.)

It took exactly one grand, we-survived-an-apocalypse-and-exams blow out party and one hungover day on the porch before Eliot turned up at Quentin’s door with a destination and a tight smile. 

Quentin, he’s so fucking fucked, because he keeps pulling Eliot in by the hand, shutting the door behind him, then walking out through the same door into a different country, a different city, a different impossible trip, Eliot’s hand pulling his. 

And then, well. 

\---

‘What’s the point of creating portals and being a Magician if you can’t go where nobody else can?’ 

They’re on the first trip. Which was also the second, and a bit of the third. 

They’ve got a picnic blanket on an outcrop. The water below is the kind of deep blue Quentin assumed was the invention of instagram filters. It’s warm, but there’s a breeze where they are halfway up the hillside, and Eliot looks shockingly at ease in his sunglasses, with his nautical stripes necktie long gone. 

Q tugs down the hem of his boat-necked, blue and white striped t-shirt, and he thinks they must look a pair. They look like the kind of people who drink to forget their problems, or who’ve never had any problems to begin with. All they need is rich parents and a yacht. 

There’s a noise of boats and diving in the far distance and red and white buoys in the water. Eliot and Quentin can’t be seen from the ground or the sea but they can watch the boats come and go in the harbour. Quentin doesn’t know if they’re in this spot by accident or design, and he doesn’t totally know where they are. 

It should be driving his anxiety wild. Except El had paused in a square in Rome, his palm flat on a white wall. He had looked back over his shoulder with his softest smile, and said, ‘Trust me?’ 

It should scare the shit out of Quentin that neither of them are inclined to fact check that trust. But all Eliot did was ask, and Quentin trusts him, he does, _ he does. _

\---

Later, they’re passing a bottle of red wine back and forwards between them and shuffling closer on a blanket. They’re debating the aesthetics of the tile museum, still. Abstract expressionism vs realism. They’re arguing for the fun of it, like any of this almost matters, now they don’t have a countdown on a whiteboard of days until they could expect to be dead. 

It’s evening. The lights are the kind of magic that Eliot waves off like it’s easy. Quentin knows that Eliot’s good at magic as clearly as he knows that Eliot hates to be known to put effort into anything. The lights are warm and get warmer while the sun sets over the water and the air cools, and fuck, fucking hell - Q can’t stand it. 

They’ve been two or three days between the B&B in Palermo and a place with a balcony in Rome and wherever the hell they are now. 

Eliot’s hair is falling out of its product, his shirt is loose and he’s lounging back on his hands. He looks relaxed down to the bones. He’s gorgeous and Quentin knew that, but he’s not sure he ever knew it the way he does now. He’s not sure if he’s _ ever _seen Eliot this settled in his own skin and the relief is almost as dizzying as the attraction. 

He can’t stand not having the words for the lightness that fills his chest when Eliot knocked at his door in the morning. Magic might come from pain but it can save lives, fix small, damaged things, and it can send them off on an adventure. 

It can make it so Q doesn’t have to face the unstructured days on his own in an empty campus, because he was too busy not dying to get a new apartment in New York, or to stop his mom from selling his dad’s house and getting rid of all of their things. 

He can’t stand not having the words to say _ thank you _to Eliot, for being there for all of it, every fucked up, brilliant, horrid thing. 

By which he means: _ thank you _ and _ don’t do _ that _ again _ . And maybe he means _ forever _. 

He definitely means: _ keep looking at me. You know, like you’ve been looking at me since the day we met _. 

‘To your first year at Brakebills and our very last year of deadly peril, Q,’ Eliot says with a smile. He drinks from the bottle, his sun-warmed skin and throat dancing in the lights, and holds it out to Q.

Quentin tries to reply and it comes out as,_ hey, um - _

And then Quentin pushes forward, past the bottle, to kiss Eliot and pull back, in less than a breath. 

The lights hover in place, as stunned as Eliot looks, and Quentin fights back a laugh, because _ he did that _ . He did that to the most composed person alive. Oh, that’s something. He wants to do it again. Can he do a thesis on _ surprising Eliot Waugh _? 

Eliot looks at him like Quentin is a puzzle he’s been trying to figure out. 

Quentin feels Eliot’s hand slowly cover his on the blanket and slips a thumb over the back of Eliot’s hand to keep him there, tries to project _ yes, yes really _ with every fibre of his being. Quentin angles his head up, _ come on, get back here, _and takes the bottle out of Eliot’s hand slowly to sit it on the grass. 

Whatever Eliot sees, he gives Quentin the slightest frown, calculates the circumstances, and takes Q’s jaw in his hand to kiss him back with intent. 

\---

‘El, the boats-’

Eliot heaves a sigh against Quentin’s forehead. 

He leans back and finishes tugging Quentin’s t-shirt off, with an arch look that tells Quentin eloquently how well he was doing _ that _on his own. Quentin rolls his eyes from where he’s sitting in Eliot’s lap. 

Eliot huffs a laugh and tilts Q’s head up with a thumb against his cheekbone. They’re both grinning, then they’re grinning against each other’s mouths, and El’s laughing against his neck and _ biting _ and saying, fervently, ‘Q, _ fuck _the boats.’

Quentin slides his hand up the back of Eliot’s neck under his shirt, which is open and making a valiant effort at staying on. He puts his palm against the back of Eliot’s head so he can keep Eliot’s mouth right there beneath his ear and mess up El’s hair some more, while Quentin gasps out, contrary: ‘But I _ like _ them.’ 

Eliot pulls away with a noise and Quentin just has to grin shakily at him. It’s fully dark and most of their lights are pretending to be lanterns low to the ground, so as not to alarm the coast guard but to keep casting heat over their picnic site.

He noses at Eliot’s nose, gets his hands into Eliot’s hair. ‘I like the boats,’ he repeats, and says, ‘thank you,’ quiet, when they’ve both got their eyes shut, and kisses Eliot soft and slow until they’re breathing hard. 

There aren’t so many boats now, but the ones that catch Q’s eye when they stop to catch their breath are a small fleet of party boats with distant music, sticking close by the shore with rotating, bright disco lights on the water. 

‘Look, boats, happy?’ Eliot’s voice is soft, and patient, and even. He’s punctuating his words by sucking small marks into different parts of the underside of Quentin’s jaw and neck and then soothing them with his tongue. Then he’s using his other hand to tug Quentin’s hair gently and _ biting Q’s earlobe _ with the barest scratch of teeth. He might as well be saying _ pay attention to me. _

Quentin adores him. He adores every exacting, insistent molecule of him. He wants those demanding marks on his neck, his collarbone, anywhere Eliot wants to put them, so long as he doesn’t _ stop. _

‘You picked this on purpose.’ 

Quentin sees the small parts of the day, each perfectly calibrated for him, to care for him, and each a small repair. He sees it for the gift it is. 

He repeats, staggered, ‘You _ picked this on purpose.’ _

Quentin turns his head back and meets Eliot’s mouth with his own, open this time. He groans when Eliot holds him tighter and kisses back. Quentin feels like his body has extra nerves where it touches Eliot’s, from Eliot’s tongue fucking his mouth to the slide of the back of Quentin’s thighs against the top of Eliot’s, and Eliot’s hand moving up his spine one slow knot at a time. 

Eliot’s breathing faster now, his pulse fast under Quentin’s tongue when he ducks under Eliot’s jaw to find it, and they’re both hard in their tasteful-walking-around-European city shorts. 

‘I- _ oh, _ ’ Eliot loses the rest of his sentence as Quentin moves even closer, chest to chest, what’s left of Eliot’s shirt caught between them. Eliot lets out another of those wrecked _ ‘oh’ _ sounds when Quentin sinks down further in his lap in search of friction. Quentin has never seen his eyes shut like that, or his head roll back like that, and he wants to see it again immediately, maybe dedicate his _ life _ to the pursuit of it. 

Quentin leans in so he’s got his cheek against Eliot’s, leaning his weight forward for balance. Eliot takes his weight with one hand on Q’s upper back, the other clutching at one of his hips, fingertips dipping just under Quentin’s waistband. 

‘Can I take these off?’ Eliot asks, thumb making small circles on Quentin’s hip. He looks at Quentin with his pupils blown huge, warm in the lights, and his hair in disarray. His crisp white shirt, the one he was wearing when they hired bikes around Rome, is grass-stained and open and hanging off his shoulders. Quentin could look at him forever. 

_ Fuck the boats, _ Quentin thinks, and says, _ ‘Yes.’ _

\--- 

‘What the _ fuck _happened to you two?’

Kady is flicking spells at targets in the garden when they step back through. She stops mid-tut and gives them a long look. 

Quentin remembers all of a sudden that he’s got grass stains on his entire back and side, that they haven’t been back in three days, and his hair is likely to be an absolute mess. He assumes Eliot is infinitely more put together than him at any given time, and Eliot looks - well, like he just had sex on a hillside - so fuck only knows what Q looks like. 

He remembers with a flash of heat to his stomach how Eliot had dragged his t-shirt neck wider to get at Q’s collarbone with his teeth. He remembers the same mouth on his neck and fights not to put his hand there protectively. 

Eliot recovers first and throws an arm around Quentin’s shoulders, squeezing it in a reassuring fashion. ‘Orgy at a gardening convention. Very debauched. Our Quentin did very well. This looks - studious.’ 

‘Coldwater,’ Kady replies, with a tone of _ didn’t think you had it in you. _She levels a look at Eliot. ‘Some of us got kicked out for six weeks, remember? Also, apparently I’m the TA for the new battle magic course, so even more to catch up on.’

‘Oh, I see how it is,’ Eliot replies and flicks a spell at one of Kady’s bottles. It hovers in the air and spins. Kady takes it out without a blink. ‘We’ll get out of your way directly.’ 

Eliot makes to steer Q inside, then pauses and casts his eyes skywards. He looks at Kady over his shoulder and says, ‘If you need - moving targets for students. I can help with that.’ 

Kady nods and says, ‘I’ll remember that. Thanks.’ She looks them up and down, ‘Better get inside. I can see two moving targets right here.’

They do, Kady’s mocking laugh following them in. After a beat of standing awkwardly in the hallway, Eliot gives him a slightly nervous, considering look and looks to his room with his jaw tight.

Quentin swallows and asks, quiet, ‘Hey, how do you feel about sharing showers?’

‘I’m incredibly on board with that,’ Eliot replies in a rush, words tripping over each other to get out of him. 

Relief that it _ might _not have been a one time thing runs through Q in a rush and Quentin pulls Eliot towards his own ensuite by the hand. When they’re stripped and standing under the downright magical water pressure, silently appreciating the water pounding down on them, Q pushes his hair off his face and looks up at Eliot. 

Eliot crashes into him, burying his head in Quentin’s neck, and Quentin feels the cool tiles against his back. ‘We had the _ shittest _ year-’ Eliot starts and Quentin feels Eliot’s hands clench. 

‘The fucking worst,’ Q agrees viciously, hands moving to find purchase on Eliot’s back. Considering they spent hours the night before having sex on a grassy outcrop of a hill somewhere, it feels oddly non-sexual to keep Eliot’s shaking chest against his and just hang on. It feels like miles of skin against skin and being alive. 

‘Q,’ Eliot says, bringing his hands to either side of Quentin’s face and kissing him, soft and fast and over and over. ‘Q, fuck, what if we saved the overthinking for the Fall and just kept - doing this?’

Quentin’s stomach falls through the floor. He’d thought Eliot was gearing up to let him down, not offer him a whole summer of - 

‘Yes,’ Quentin kisses him back, pulls him in, ‘_ yes.’ _Q kisses back and lets the water run over them both. 

\---

He knows Eliot isn’t entirely okay. He knows because they don’t talk about Mike and they never go to Ibiza, where he died, not once, not even when Margo goes for _ weeks _ . Eliot doesn’t comment on it, conspicuously, and Quentin follows his lead. They don’t even go anywhere _ like _the clubs and orgies in Ibiza, like Eliot won’t risk invoking the memories, and it makes Q ache to watch him brush it off. 

Quentin knows Eliot needs the trips away as much as he does. They end up day drinking into oblivion less and less. Quentin is so relieved to see that those tipsy, not hammered, days exist again that he’d go anywhere Eliot asked. 

Julia is persuaded to come on some of the educational jaunts - mostly by Eliot, to Quentin’s surprise, and Q is warmed to recognise those trips as an olive branch after their epic fights over tactics, strategy, Quentin and fresh pasta last year. 

He’s not surprised to see Eliot’s sharp intelligence on display in libraries and museums - it’s been there all along, they’re all alive because of it. But Eliot would hate to be caught learning, caught being anything so gauche as in progress, and it’s nice to watch Jules realise it and adjust, too. 

Instead, he wheedles and pokes at Q and Julia until they geek out _ at _ him, and they tell him all about the atrium of the Royal Library in Sweden and Nietzsche breaking away from Schopenhauer. 

Eliot laughs and laughs when Jules tries to open a ferocious debate about the surrealist view of the unconscious, and Quentin walks away from her in the Louvre, muttering about how arguing about it for the sixteenth time won’t change his mind. 

Eliot, in turn, demonstrates the difference between setting the same speech on a proscenium stage vs in the round by _ breaking them into several theatres _ and demonstrating _ . _Julia goes along with this with a shrug, even when Eliot mentions that they really need Margo back for this kind of break in. 

They make it work, though, and Eliot pulls himself up onto a stage to start a monologue Quentin hasn’t heard before. Not that he’s been to a lot of theatre, and most of that was Shakespeare or _ Waiting for Godot. _ Not Beckett generally, _ Waiting for Godot. _For some reason it was a thing with his teachers. 

He thinks he could be persuaded to see more theatre if it was a disheveled Eliot sliding onto a stage like he owned it. Quentin is never going to be able to _ unhear _ Eliot’s voice saying, soft and loud, somehow general and _ addressing Quentin _: ‘Why did I fall in love with you? One time, you smiled at me.’ 

He hears static and also _ every single word _ while Julia looks between them and figures out, fuck, pretty much everything. 

\---

On traveling home days, they make it back before evening so Eliot can host in the cottage, the others flickering in from portals and Penny trips in gatherings and configurations of their own. It’s almost a routine. Half the time they’re in Italy, Penny tracks them down with a locator spell and tells them to bring pizza for the group, assholes. 

It’s a smaller group than the cottage is built for, but it seems to shrink around them to right size. Sometimes Josh-from-_ that _-class hitches a lift on their portal or with Penny, and they all eat around the big table. Turns out Margo and Eliot knew him in his Brakebills days, so he’s friend-group-adjacent and treated as such.

The kitchen acquires dishes and cups from markets around the world, and supplies to match. It feels overwhelming that Q can look at most rooms in the cottage and see objects where he knows their history, after losing so many pieces of his own. He knows about the fight Julia and Alice had over haggling, he can remember what that ship in a bottle looked like without the chip in the rim. He’s leaving traces - they all are - traces that this place is theirs. 

Quentin arrived with some pictures of him and his dad, and a couple of old pictures of him and Julia. He misses his dad and his entire being feels like an open wound if he thinks about it too much. But every time he feels like he’s falling down a well with no end, he thinks about the stack of polaroids and photo booth strips from around Europe building up on Eliot’s window seat. 

They’re proof of all the places he’s been since his dad’s funeral happened while he lay in a shitty magical coma, proof that there’s a world and Quentin is doing his best to keep living in it, even when he isn’t sure what that means. Even when he has to hand off navigation and steering to someone else just to breathe. 

The fridge has a growing set of magnets to greet the returning class - the cheesiest, worst ones they can all find, shamrocks and obnoxious cocktail puns and miniature landmarks. There’s also those Italian tiles, and a bunch of small bi and rainbow and pan magnets from London Pride, tucked out of harm’s way in the bottom corner. 

\---

[voice note: 0:15] 

_ ‘Bambi, Defcon Trojan. Defcon Magnum. Defcon Magnum Opus. I have _ stories. _ Please call me, we need to compare notes. Love and all that shit.’ _

\---

Some trips they don’t open to the group. Those mostly end - or start - with sex. 

After Palermo, the next Q-and-El only trip is Paris and they don’t make it past the bed. They’re fucking as soon as the wards are up, and Quentin’s main memories of Paris are tasteful curtains, heavy duvets that they hide under or throw off, and so much really great, brand new sex with Eliot that he feels drunk on it. 

In Ireland, it rains, even though the weather said it wouldn’t, and Eliot backs Quentin into the B&B room door with a muttered _ ‘thank god’. _Eliot goes to his knees and looks up at Quentin, and asks, ‘Can I make it last? If you’re close?’

Quentin has to kiss him for that, has to say _yes_ so many times Eliot is breathing the word in as often as air. They get on the bed and Eliot pulls Q round so he’s sitting at the edge, knees apart. Then he ducks his head and slides his mouth over Q’s dick, and gives him the most thorough, endless blow job Quentin’s ever had in his entire life. Eliot takes him to the edge of coming twice before he swallows him down, and when Quentin comes, he sees _galaxies _and _nebulae _behind his eyes. 

Quentin’s a wreck, after, so much so that Eliot puts him to bed and curls up around him until he falls asleep, then insists on food, water and sharing a bath.

The next day, when they’re wandering around a succession of pubs, Quentin tries not to grin too much when he sees and feels the small bruises on his hips and the bite marks on the inside of his thighs, but he fails completely. Eliot, of course, knows, and puts his arm around Quentin more than usual to press his fingertips into Quentin’s hip where the bruises are under his tightest jeans. 

\--

[voice message: 1:09]

_ ‘Queen Margo, could you deign to check your messages? It might be important. I mean, not, like, the fate of all magic important, and everybody’s alive. But - look, I’m about to say something serious, so sit your glorious ass on a throne, and appreciate that I’m recording this _ sober. _ So I’m trusting you to delete this or I’ll hack your phone and let a family of sprites live in it and call your exes whenever the fuck they like as if it’s that one overgrown peach from that kids’ book you like. [audible inhale] I - oh, Quentin, come in - your toothbrush? Counter, left, where you left it, you’d forget your head - I’m recording a withering tirade about the hotel eggs benedict for Margo, care to join?’ _

_ ‘They were fine!’ _

_ ‘You have no palate! Excuse me, Bambi, you can see what I’m dealing with here.’ _

\--

Quentin returns the favour when they stagger in from London Pride, Eliot’s hands smudging the face paint rainbows on his cheekbones, eyes wide and blown, like they haven’t been working each other up all day with small touches and pulling each other through clouds of glitter and crowds of fabulous strangers by the hand. 

Quentin goes to his knees, pushes Eliot back against the door and takes Eliot in his mouth until his eyeliner runs from it. He works him over until Eliot’s just a stream-of-consciousness monologue above him, and Quentin feels like he can’t possibly fuck it up with Eliot’s hands in Quentin’s hair to tell him what he wants, and to put him where he wants him to go.

\---

[voice note: -:--]

_ ‘You fucker, El, I thought you and Q were drinking wine dangerously near old asshole books? You said you were staying in New York! At Brakebills! I don’t doubt you can find someone to fuck anywhere, even Brakebills in the summer, but if you’ve decided to fuck around with the postdoc with the emo bangs, honestly, do you even trust people who survive Brakebills and come back for more? Come back with bangs and messenger ba - oh, shit, it’s _ Quentin, _ you’re fucking the emotional support Quentin, he’s fucking the emotional support Eliot, I shouldn’t have listened to these in order, except I missed you so I did, you fucking dick of a bastard. You fucker. You predictable assholes. Fen, honey, you hold on to the new knives for me, okay? I have to fuck up some shit in - what the fuck, the locator spell says Italy now?’ _

[voice note: cancelled]

\---

They don’t find out when Margo finds out. As is right and proper, they find out that Margo knows when Margo deigns to tell them. 

They’re in Venice, off St Mark’s Square, sitting at a small wrought iron outdoor table with takeaway pizza and gelato, ordering bottles of medium sweet wine from the bar. 

Eliot holds his cone out for Quentin to taste. Quentin does, and says, ‘thank you, that’s nice.’ 

Eliot doesn’t move the cone out of Quentin’s face. He gently shakes it at him, as if another taste will improve his tasting notes, so Q makes a show of it, looking up through his eyelashes and dragging it out, groaning and flicking his tongue as showily as he can. Eliot raises his eyebrows like he’s unimpressed but Quentin also hears him clear his throat. _ Ha. _

Q knows it’s infuriatingly inadequate praise for something so fancy as ricotta and pistachio paired with a scoop of sicilian almond and cremino. It’s a bold choice, but it’s good. Quentin knows this because, before he bought it, Eliot tapped the glass, took his own chin in his hand, pondered and said: _ I think this could be an exquisitely bold choice, but it should be good, nonetheless. _

He holds out his own mint chocolate and vanilla combo cone for Eliot to try. 

‘Delicate peppermint accents,’ Eliot comments seriously, as if modeling better gelato tasting technique. His hand covers Quentin’s and squeezes a little to keep the cone in the air as he takes another deeply explicit taste, complete with head tilt, and keeps his eyes on Quentin’s. ‘Hint of salt in the dark chocolate chips, unexpectedly complex.’ 

Quentin nods, equally serious, and licks the ice cream near to Eliot’s hand before it melts down the side. ‘So your hands don’t get sticky.’ He gives Eliot a small, wilfully innocent smile. ‘I’m helping.’

Eliot makes a cut off noise and catches the hand Quentin has fluttering in the air between them, when a magnificent heeled boot with intricate metalwork inlayed into the heel lands in Quentin’s lap. 

‘So that’s what it looks like when you blow each other, boys.’ 

Margo drops into the third seat and brings her other leg up so they’re both in Quentin’s lap, crossed at the ankle. She looks fabulous and is attired exactly for the occasion, down to the eye patch, of course. 

Quentin six months ago might have ran away with sheer mortification, and from Margo and Eliot if he’d known how, but Quentin chooses instead to laugh into Margo’s shoulder and let her kiss him on the head. 

‘Was that merely a sparkling observation, Bambi?’ Eliot asks, flicking his fingers under the cover of fixing his collar to bring a glass and bottle closer. He pours one out for Margo and sends it back across the table. 

Margo raises her glass to Eliot, drinks the whole damn thing, and declares loudly, ‘No, you’re absolutely fucking, darling. You fucked this morning. You fucked Quentin literally into this fine, sun-blessed afternoon with the power of your dick and your mighty thighs, and you’re _ very _ proud of it.’ 

Eliot tips his head back and laughs so loudly birds fly from a rooftop. 

Quentin looks at Eliot with horror. Margo swipes the ice cream from Quentin to try it with a performative, elaborate groan.

Eliot likes to _ hear him _ when they’re fucking, and Quentin’s been working on letting him, because he does enjoy sex more when he’s not worrying about keeping quiet. It’s easier to let himself go when they’re not at Brakebills, but sometimes, _ they’re at Brakebills, _ and sometimes, they think the cottage is _ empty. _

‘Eliot. _ Eliot. _ Please tell me you put the wards up last night. And this morning.’ 

Eliot takes Quentin’s hand across the table and stares into his eyes. ‘I swear on my finest, dustiest bottle of Brut -’ 

‘Those belong to _ Brakebills, _ pick something you actually care about _ .’ _

‘Not if I drink them before I graduate.’

‘Technicality.’

‘Semantics.’

‘That’s not-’

‘Please, Q, _ I swear _on your glorious ass that I set the wards, because I’m respectful of your kinks, and I happen to know that isn’t currently one of them.’

Quentin rolls his eyes. 

‘Baby, nobody heard you fucking,’ Margo starts, voice imbued with infinite patience, and pats his arm. ‘He didn’t give the game away. You did. And mostly just to me. You’re a lot less jumpy. And you -’ 

Margo flicks a splash of wine at Eliot and Quentin can’t help sending him a _ ha! _look. ‘I’m thrilled the sex to blackout drunk ratio is experiencing a dick-adjacent upswing this quarter, and I do love you. But it doesn’t change the fact that, if you met subtle, we both know you’d try to fuck it.’ 

Eliot continues to be delighted and flicks wine back at Margo.

Quentin looks between them, smiling. ‘Hey, those grapes died for nothing.’

Eliot grins at Margo and kisses her hand delicately. ‘I’ve missed you so much. Shall we sacrifice more grapes in your honour?’

Margo rolls her eye but allows it. ‘Don’t get sentimental. I’ve got shovel talks to rehearse and threats to devise. You should know I’ll be issuing threats to your manhood with new ceremonial daggers.’

‘They will be elegant,’ Eliot nods.

‘Poignant and stirring,’ Quentin contributes. ‘Rooted in a grand literary tradition.’ 

‘Poetry but with a soupçon of a gruesome reality,’ Eliot finishes, shoots Q a grin and going with the bit. ‘Tapping into the oral traditions of declamation.’ 

They look at Margo at the same time, with the same grin.

Margo pulls her knees up and leans against Quentin, supremely unbothered. ‘You pointed cocks have made your point. Fuck each other instead of fucking up. I need you both and we do not have the luxury of pretending good things don’t matter.’

Q thinks that that doesn’t sound like the Ibiza year-round endless fuckfest he’s been told so much about, and Margo’s fingertips stray across the curving metal bracelet halfway up her forearm. 

As Quentin’s about to ask about it, she signals for a bottle and when the waiter drops it off, Eliot pours glasses for all of them. 

Margo unravels herself far enough from Quentin to raise a glass and no more. ‘To giving each other the deep dicking the world so badly wanted to give us, with fucking interest.’

‘Fuck, yes,’ Quentin answers with feeling. ‘And to you,’ he says, bopping his nose against Margo’s bare shoulder.

‘To that, and to Margo, long may you reign,’ Eliot declares. 

\---

A sex toys museum in Prague makes them both laugh more than anything else, because they’re super mature like that. Eliot fakes a stern face and loudly tells Q to respect the objects. Then he leans in and mutters obscene ideas about _ ‘handling’ _ Q’s ass until they’re both flushed and Quentin is squirming inside the arm slung around his shoulder. Quentin drags Eliot out by the hand. 

They fall into bed laughing, and Eliot fucks him, laughing into his shoulder blade, his neck, his collarbone. Quentin comes laughing, hanging on loosely with his arms around Eliot’s neck. They spend the rest of the day mentioning ‘copulation tables’ and falling over again. It’s nothing like the trip they had planned, and so much better for it. 

\---

[voice note: 0:45]

_ ‘..... If I concede you made one cogent point in Italy while that bartender was flirting with Quentin and he was flustered about it, and you know, Quentin was trying to repair the crack in that one glass - ugh, I hate this. And you. I don’t, I don’t. … Wave a scarf at the sea in the breeze for me while I suffer, won’t you? Fuck an entire orgy of tens. Pour one out for Mi- oh, would you look at the time, time for our dinner reservation.’ _

\---

Something snaps in Quentin, then, somewhere around the third week of portal-hopping, sex-having summer break. 

The thing is - he suspects he’s never been very good in bed before Eliot. He knows that what he lacks in previous attention to detail he’s making up with enthusiasm. He’s not - exactly - inexperienced, and he’s had sex with men before, but -

Q knows sex was a thing he did sometimes to self-medicate. He knows he chased the sensation to feel_ something _outside of himself and he knows the way he relates to sex isn’t entirely unknown to Eliot, either. 

Which is a long way of saying: Q had been in pain, and a little bit selfish about it, the way you are if pain is your whole world, from centre to edge, and you feel like nothing else can loom so large. 

But the precision in the way Eliot takes him to pieces and takes _care _of him makes Q want to learn to make sex about someone else so badly that it’s an ache. He wants to learn _Eliot_. He wants to know how to do _that _to Eliot. 

Q knows he doesn’t have the healthiest relationship with his brain, his body or his self-image, but the way Eliot wants him feels like winning the lottery, and he’d like to be just a little more worthy of it. 

\---

[Julia, Paris, 7.38am; Quentin, New York City, 1.38am; both are in five star hotels]

Q: ????????

Q: _ ???????? _

Jules: Q!!!! what.

Q: brain thing. eliot thing.

Jules: tell me.

Q: early there?

Jules: [picture of a Parisian sunrise from a picturesque balcony. It is very obviously a screenshot of a heavily filtered, photoshopped stock photo, emblazoned with the Getty Images logo. The google image search, ‘dramatic paris sunrise,’ is still visible across the top.] 

Jules: 🙄

Jules: yes early but i was still up. we got back at like 6 and penny is asleep on me so go for it

Q: he’s probably thinking of ways to kill me in his sleep

Jules: i’d like to say not everything is about you but he does find that relaxing, like some kind of psychic stress ball

Q: i mean if it’s video game death i’ll just respawn to annoy him more

Jules: i think it’s sci-fi so you come back like two years later, just in time, at great cost, with vital plot knowledge

Q: is that also a gandalf death

Jules: or a comic book death

Q: comic book death or _ comic book _death

Jules: “comic book” “death”

Q: ah **comic book **death

Jules: <strike>comic book death</strike>

Q: holy shit teach me i want strikethrough

Jules: [ https://lmgtfy.com/?q=strikthrough+whats+app ](https://lmgtfy.com/?q=strikthrough+whats+app)

Q: top 10 anime betrayals ;____;

Q: i’m so glad we’re all comfortable joking about my genre almost death

Jules: we’re not yet but we’re pushing through it together

Q: thanks jules <3

Q: did i hear kady leave with you? 

Jules is typing

Jules is typing

Jules is

Jules: yes

Q: ** _is kady asleep on you too_ **

Jules: I said yes, like, right there^ why are you obsessed with this

Q: aw

Q: awwwww _ jules _

Q: 😍

Jules: dude you’re awake and texting me at [checks watch i’m not wearing] 2am because eliot is asleep and being cute about it and you’re having e·mot·ions

Q: yeah but you had a threesome with penny and kady sooooooo

Jules: maybe

Q: _ maybe _

Jules: totally did though didn’t i

Q: i;m so happy for you omfg

Q: *i’m

Jules: Q

Jules: _ Q _

Jules: _ Q _

Jules: you do realise we’re like texting each other from fancy places

Q: while in bed with hot people

Q: who are fucking _ magicians, _which is what we also are

Jules: and we’re all fucking _ magicians _

Q: [jake peralta i love life halloween gif]

Jules: [mushu from mulan I live gif]

Jules: ikr! i kinda wanna go back in time and tell us it’s going to suck for a while but we’ll be okay, you know?

Q: i respect the hell out of you and you make me cry with your words but why did you have to use _ suck _

Jules: YOU KNOW WHY, my fellow bi disaster

Q: lmao

Jules: haha

Q: you know, with your hot people

Jules: … go on, but you do realise you called penny hot right there and i took a screenshot to have that receipt forever

Q: was there like a thing where you went from like hurray for this sex we’re having to oh shit i like you for not just sex

Q: i’m comfortable enough with our mutual frenemies situation to recognise penny is hot

Q: i’m just never saying it to _ him _

Jules: yeah there was a thing and it was super cute, because we’re all really cute

Q is typing

Q is typing

Q -

Jules: i could be like, the mean friend here

Jules: but last year was so shit 

Jules: and i’m just really super amazed we’re both alive and mostly okay

Jules: maybe even kinda happy

Jules: so if you like him that much you should tell him that because he probably needs to hear it

Jules: you don’t have to, like, keynote speech it for this. you just have to tell him you’re trying and he can help you figure out the rest

Q: just, like, start the sentence and see what happens

Q: you know i’d definitely rather do a keynote

Jules: yeah. you’re good at both of those things. it’s a totally badass thing about you. 

Jules: also it worked out great for me. like just saying, _ so _ great

Q: tell me the cute thing

Jules: thank you

Q: _ tell me the cute thing _

Jules: tell you next dinner. there’s a thing and 

Jules: your face is going to be amazing

Q: MEAN FRIEND

Jules: i’m a cinnamon roll and you know it 

Q: no you look like one but you’d totally kill a dude

Q: OH SHIT J 

Q: um I didn’t

Q: fuck that was

Q: jules i’m so sorry

Q is typing

Q is_ typing _

_ Q is typing _

Jules: chill gandalf 

Jules: i laughed so hard i nearly woke up penny

Jules: he says fuck off and also fuck you

Jules: i don’t think he woke up. i think that’s just how he responds to your name

Jules: (we’re cool Q stand down i can hear you writing it on a stone tablet of fuck ups from _ france) _

Jules: screenshot this and look at it if you’re wondering

Jules: i really am okay

Jules: screenshot that too get the time and date in

Q: i hope that wasn’t a joke because i did that

Q: sorry

Jules: that’s why I said it. eliot sleep through all this shit?

Q: he’s reading an article about blue light technology out loud in the voice of an english lord from his phone

Q: wait he corrected me

Q: he says it’s the voice of _ the bastard son _ of an english lord and i should get it right

Jules: oh my god Q you’re ridiculous. he’s ridiculous. don’t tell him I said that we’re still 40% enemies

Q: ignoring that^ this thing, i don’t hate it

Jules: you should tell him _ that _while i go sleep which is now. have fun

Q: yeah ok

Jules: think of it as practice

\---

They’re reading in Eliot’s room a week later when he finds a way to ask. They’re sprawled over Eliot’s unmade bed in soft pyjamas, kicking their feet and knees against each other and reading their pages ten times each. 

It’s approaching lunchtime, but Eliot padded out of the room in a robe with a glare and a ‘stay where you are’ when Quentin tried to get up, blinking and bleary. Eliot came back from the kitchen with coffee and cooked brunch and they haven’t made it out of bed since. 

(They’d meant to go to Bruges today, but Eliot had spent the night waking up Quentin from nightmares about flames and moths until the sun rose at 5am, so Eliot’s made the executive decision that portals don’t exist today.) 

Quentin has more of his meagre first year belongings in Eliot’s room than his own, at this point. Everything he’s brought back from Europe, and everything from that time they went to the storage unit his mom dumped the contents of his dad’s house in, never even made it to his own room. 

His new meds are on Eliot’s side of the bed and there’s a spare bottle in both of their go bags. 

Through clever magic by Alice and Lipson, the bottles are synced together and spelled to glow green when enough linear time has passed in Q’s subjective experience to take a dose, no matter what time difference the portals dole out. It’s so genuinely useful that Q still isn’t over it. 

Quentin rolls onto his side, leaning on his elbow and looking at Eliot. It’s very unhelpful to his academic experience that Eliot’s gorgeous hands on books have turned out to be such a specific kink for Q, and that Eliot knows it, and tends to trace fingers both down his back and the spine of his book. 

Because he’s a shit, Q tends to retaliate by letting his hair fall over his face and blowing it away badly, watching Eliot’s hands clench like he’s fighting not to touch and neaten it up for him, the way he tucks in tags at the back of Quentin’s neck just to rest his arms on Quentin’s shoulders, or stands close to get a smudge off his cheek. 

Q’s other favourite is putting his pen in his mouth to turn pages, and forgetting to take it out, which makes Eliot send him a look like he’s contemplating what else Q could be holding in his mouth.

It’s a lot like the entire year before that they spent blocking each other’s pages with their hands, or Eliot saying _ Quentin, Quentin, Quentin _ over and Quentin saying _ Eliot Eliot Eliot what _ and vice versa _ . _Except now they poke and banter and it might end in sex. 

This time Eliot is pretending he doesn’t know Quentin’s right there, looking at him. He’s frowning attractively down at the text, making little _ hmm _noises and running a fingertip down the margin in a suitably pornographic fashion. 

Eliot only pretends to ignore him for a couple of minutes, then pokes him in the ribs. ‘Ask, please, god. Before I die of old age, as unlikely as that is.’ 

‘You better,’ Quentin tilts his head and slowly leans back on the bed. He puts a fingertip against El’s cheek speculatively then he folds his hands behind his head. His long-sleeved tee rides up. Eliot’s eyes flicker down and back up - and then down again. Eliot slowly traces the fingertips of his index and middle fingers against Q’s stomach, and Quentin shudders. 

Quentin keeps his voice light with effort. He’s not nervous, but he’s about to ask more than Eliot’s offered so far, and they’ve only got two or three weeks of the summer left. 

(Not that Quentin’s counting. Not that he’s been counting all along.)

‘Do you, uh, want to go to a house? I mean, with me? With a ton of condoms and lube? For like, a week?’

Eliot fully blanks out for eight or nine seconds, then scrambles to pin Quentin to the mattress, book going over the edge of the bed. Quentin hitches a leg up so it’s against the back of Eliot’s leg and uses it to tug him closer. 

‘That’s the best idea you’ve ever had,’ Eliot bites out with a roll of his hips and a searing kiss. He’s covering Quentin with his body and groaning against his mouth. ‘Including the ones that literally saved all of our lives last term.’ Quentin, already on edge, feels himself get hard embarrassingly quickly. 

Eliot looks up at Q, slides down the bed and grins, _ oh no. _ He pulls down Q’s pyjamas, says, ‘we’re going to do everything, Q, fucking everything,’ and sinks his mouth down on Q’s dick. 

Quentin arches up in one long curve with a yell. Fuck, Eliot is _ so good _at that, he doesn’t know what he’s going to do when this is over. 

When Quentin moves his hands, because how can he _ not, _ Eliot pushes them back towards his head. He asks, ‘keep them there?’ and mutters, ‘a week, oh, fuck, I’m banning _ clothes _,’ against Q’s stomach.

Q agrees, loudly. When Eliot turns him over and dives in to open Q up on his tongue, Quentin moans, desperate against the sheets.

Eliot’s lining up to push into him when Quentin remembers, and manages to gasp out, ‘It’s a - lighthouse, El, a _ lighthouse.’ _

Eliot slides into him with a groan and replies, ‘Of course you love that.’ He pulls back, then thrusts into him with a shout, and says unsteadily, ‘but I don’t care if it’s a _ palace _ so long as you’re th- _ oh, fuck, Q.’ _

\---

[voice message: 0:15]

_ ‘Bambi, what if I fuck this up? I think I get it. What Quentin wants. But honestly, it sounds like something I might really fuck up.’ _

[voice message: 0:12]

_ ‘El, baby, you don’t know how. You’ve got this. Remember our lady of tiny, beautiful things, and ask better questions, sweet pea.’ _

[gif of Ru Paul, caption: _good luck, and_ _don’t fuck it up]_

El: that is actually reassuring, thank you

Bambi: go and be so debauched you make death proud to take us

El: category is: high roman fashion

\---

Q gets to the lighthouse and nerds the fuck out. They can see for _ miles and miles _from the coast of Norfolk. He spends an entire morning pretending he has to prevent disasters.

(He does not; it’s fully automated and they don’t have access to the operational level. That’s probably for the best given their track record with shit that they’re not trained in any way for or prepared to do). 

Quentin spends the morning happily bouncing between levels with a rolled up sea chart. He does this while wearing a knitted beanie hat because it’s a _ lighthouse. _

Eliot keeps looking at him with soft eyes when he thinks Quentin can’t see, and Quentin _ fucking loves it, _ feels his eyes on him like a soft touch _ . _ He doesn’t do anything but grin to himself when it happens, until Eliot catches Quentin halfway down a thin ladder, and Quentin thinks, _ yes, yes, yes, _and goes happily into his arms. 

Eliot plucks him from the ladder, Q wraps his legs around El’s waist and El pushes him back against it. Then Eliot proceeds to kiss the _ fuck _ out of him. It’s soft and unrelenting, and Quentin might die of it, but he might also die if Eliot stops. Every time Quentin tries to speed things up, Eliot says _ nuh uh _and drags his mouth across Q’s in a pleased, ridiculous tone, then keeps to his maddening, steady pace. 

By the time Eliot pulls back with a grin, he’s pushed Quentin’s hair back with one hand to get rid of the hat and Quentin’s shifting, fidgeting against him. Quentin feels lightheaded when he realises Eliot is holding Q’s weight against the ladder with _one hand and telekinesis. _He feels like his body is turning to liquid. 

Eliot leans back to look at him, slowly leans his forehead against Quentin’s and lets his eyes fall closed. He settles his hand behind Q’s ear and moves to press a deliberate, closed-mouth kiss against the opposite side of Quentin’s neck. 

Quiet, into Q’s ear, he asks, ‘Bed?’

Quentin thinks he might actually, out loud, reply, ‘wreck me, please.’ It would be mortifying except, oh fuck, Eliot takes his time about it, and he _ does. _

He takes Quentin apart like the summer never has to end, with endless gentle questions. He coaxes preferences and requests out of him. Eliot asks Quentin to tell him what he wants and waits exactly long enough before doing it that Quentin thinks he might implode, gasping and sensitive to every touch of Eliot’s hands and tongue, real and anticipated. 

_ \--- _

They go for a walk on the coast the next day.

It’s British summer time, so it’s raining, but it’s being apathetic about it. Mostly they’re a bit damp because the air is damp. The sea is a rolling, stormy mix of greys, and two Border Collies run up to them. They swear fealty to Quentin like they’re knights and he’s a returning king. 

Quentin splits his attention between them apologetically, then looks up at the owner - a lovely person with an exasperated expression and a red waterproof. ‘Sorry,’ he says to the right one, petting the left until it leans in to push its way under his hand, ‘Sorry -’

Eliot, thank god, is charming enough for the both of them. He smoothly steals Quentin’s hand from above both dogs, turns his most dazzling smile on the red waterproof and says, ‘I’ve called dibs, darling.’ 

The undeterred dog-walker tells them _ no problem _(when clearly, it had been a problem. Fucking Brits) and walks on. Eliot keeps a hold of his hand. 

Quentin thinks this would be a moment to realise something, if it didn’t feel like what they’d been doing all along. If there hadn’t been some spark there when Eliot pulled him along to his entrance exam, muttering, ‘yes, yes, you’re very cute,’ while Quentin stared at everything he’d ever wanted - Brakebills, magic, _ Eliot. _

\--

Q: I made friends!!!

Q is typing

Q is typing

Q is typing

Jules: gimme the dog pictures, Q, don’t you dare hold out on me

\--

They get back to the lighthouse and curl up around each other, shucking off the top layer of their damp clothes and not bothering to get dressed again. The rain starts to rattle against the lighthouse, and the waves are loud against the coast outside. Quentin slides his knee slowly down across Eliot’s leg. He takes Eliot’s face in both of his hands, then stops. 

Eliot goes still, searching Q’s face with a frown and asks, ‘Quentin? You okay?’ 

They’re alive, they’re happy. Eliot’s voice vibrates on a too-familiar worried frequency. 

(If they stopped there and didn’t do anything but trace lines across each other’s skin, it wouldn’t be the first time. Sometimes Q’s brain and El’s memories didn’t let them do anything else, even when they really want to fuck each other a whole lot.

Quentin used to feel shit when that happened, with other people, and he probably ruined as many chances with people by apologising so much, because his anxiety wouldn’t _ let it go _. It doesn’t feel so bad when it happens with Eliot, because last year happened to them both, and he doesn’t have to explain that. 

It just feels like a thing that happens sometimes. Q thinks - with the exception of Margo - maybe it’s the only thing that’s a real, true first for both of them, this kind of intimacy without sex, without the _ condition _of sex.) 

Except today Quentin is actually all about the sex. Or wants to be. He just wants to - try something. 

He swallows and opens his eyes. He can choose this. Eliot gave him a map for it. Q can offer, too. 

‘Yeah, I’m okay, I still - I just, can I try something?’

Eliot nods, watching him carefully and keeps rubbing warm circles on Quentin’s back. 

‘Can I ask you what you like? Like you did?’ Quentin bites his lip and releases it. ‘You - um - you might need to help me with some of the specifics.’

Eliot smiles at him and meets him nose to nose, mouth against his. ‘Thank you,’ he says, and Quentin frowns, because that feels like a non-sequitur, and it probably shouldn’t. ‘Tell me why?’

Quentin opens his mouth and closes it. Buries his head in Eliot’s chest and feels El’s hands running up and down his back. He remembers why he mistook liking _ sex _for loving the sensation of somebody else’s body against his when he was an undergrad, touch-starved and trying to fuck around. 

It’s like the thing that eats his brain can’t find him so easily, so often, when he’s pulled to the surface of himself by someone else’s hands.

‘What you do feels - fucking amazing. And- um, you.’ Breathe in, and out, he orders himself. ‘You take care of me when we’re having sex, and I love that, I’ve - I’ve noticed that.’ _ In, and out. _‘I want to do that for you, too.’

Eliot takes a breath and lets it out. He speaks slowly, carefully, choosing each word. ‘I wondered if we’d end up talking about this here.’ 

Eliot lies back and pulls Q to him, and Q goes, head on El’s chest. Eliot cards a hand through Quentin’s hair. 

‘I know we said no overthinking this summer but I kind of need to know you’re still okay with how we’ve been fucking.’ He pauses. ‘No kind of about it, actually.’

Oh, Q thinks, it’s much easier like this. He doesn’t have to meet Eliot’s eyes while also trying to get his even-messier-than-usual feelings in order _ and _ try to keep them off his face at the same time. 

‘El, I’m good, honestly,’ he answers, and wraps his arm around Eliot’s ribs. ‘I’m - fucking great. Doing this, with you.’ Quentin almost says, _ I don’t think I could trust anybody else, _but he manages to stop himself just in time. 

He looks up, ‘I just didn’t want you to feel like you have to make all of the decisions or do so much of the work.’ Quentin feels his mouth quirk up. ‘Sometimes it feels like you get me off out of - I don’t know, sheer fucking skill? Talent? Like, and then there’s me, just like - I - don’t laugh - I just get lucky with you.’ 

Eliot doesn’t laugh but his eyes are dancing and bright as he pulls Q up so Quentin’s got a palm down on either side of Eliot’s head and he’s looking down on him. ‘Getting lucky, Coldwater? Up all night to-’ 

Quentin pulls a pillow out of the pile behind Eliot and hits the side of his head with it. 

Eliot laughs. If Quentin could make a home in a sound, he thinks he’d choose Eliot’s happiest, most surprised laugh. 

‘Q, Q -’ Eliot takes his wrists and holds them, thumbs stroking over Quentin’s pulse. ‘It might help if I try something.’ 

Quentin tilts his head, intrigued. 

‘Yesterday gave me some ideas. It might help with - what you’re talking about. Let me lead for a minute?’ Quentin’s body shivers - sex ideas from Eliot tend to be _ great ideas _for Quentin. ‘Say ‘stop’ if you want to stop and let me know if you need a break. Trust me?’

Quentin hears the instructions and feels something in his brain short out in the best way. He kisses Eliot once, hard, and says ‘yes’ in as firm a tone as he knows. He’s still a bit nervous, but this is Eliot, and he _ trusts Eliot. _He doesn’t think he’s ever trusted anybody he shared a bed with more. 

He pushes back from his hands so he’s straddling Eliot. The small, narrow window lets a slice of the blurry, rainy sea view in. He grins down at Eliot and makes a show of pushing his hair back, but in that way that actually pulls more of it across his face. He feels his face heating up. 

Eliot leans forward, propped up on an elbow, and pushes it back for him, head tilting at an angle. 

‘Q, do you like when I squeeze your wrist?’ Eliot gently wraps his fingers around Quentin’s wrists again and squeezes a little. Quentin nods. 

‘This? When I pull your hair?’ Eliot walks his hand up Q’s back to tug his hair. Quentin lets his neck and shoulder muscles go loose at the sensation, the way they usually do. He gives over to it, lets Eliot rock his head back a little while he watches Q’s eyes flutter shut. 

He feels a hum in the back of his mind go quiet, then feels Eliot’s other clever hand pushing gently into his shoulder muscles and unknotting them. Eliot’s hand in his hair drags nails softly across Quentin’s scalp and the contrast makes him want to roll around the bed like a cat. 

Eliot sits up and shifts them until Q’s in his lap, in Eliot’s arms. He lowers his head slowly, telegraphing his movements. He draws his tongue across Quentin’s nipple, then follows with his teeth. Quentin feels himself exhale, let out a groan, and another firm, determined _ yes _. 

Eliot lowers his hand to Q’s boxers and pauses until Quentin nods, says, _ ‘please.’ _Eliot slips a hand under his waistband and takes Q’s cock in his hand. He starts to stroke him slowly, getting one of the bottles of lube from under a pillow and slicking him up. Quentin starts to feel himself rocking up into it. 

He hears Eliot talking to him, slow and quiet, just ‘got you’, and ‘this?’ and ‘look at you’ over and over. Quentin pulls his head back down and lets himself fall forward until he’s mouthing ‘yes’ and ‘this’ and ‘thank you’ against Eliot’s temple, his mouth, his neck. 

‘Q,’ Eliot says, a little louder. He brings up a hand under Quentin’s jaw and pulls his head up to meet his eyes and hold them. ‘Q, what if I stopped?’ 

_ ‘Oh, fuck,’ _Quentin gasps out sharply and slumps forward. Eliot steadies him with both hands on Quentin’s shoulders, and Quentin manages to say, ‘Oh, fuck, yes.’

Eliot is grinning against his shoulder, leaning down to steady himself against Quentin, too. ‘Quentin, what if I asked you not to touch yourself?’ 

Quentin groans, wants to beg Eliot to keep going, except - he slaps his own palms against Eliot’s chest and braces himself there like Eliot gave him an order. 

Eliot leans in and noses against Quentin’s nose. Quentin lets out a sound at the touch. ‘You’re doing so well, you look so good.’ Quentin swallows and noses back, and Eliot asks, ‘What if I just watched you for a while?’

His skin doesn’t know what to do with that. It’s an all-encompassing, overwhelming feeling, and Quentin usually hates those because they’ve only ever been bad. But he thinks this might be a good one. 

It reminds him of riding Eliot on a hillside and looking up to see nothing but stars, and looking out to the dark sea with the lights dancing on it, and down to see Eliot looking up at him like a horizon all of his own making. Quentin can picture it. He can picture lying shifting on the bed with Eliot balanced on an elbow, smiling, waiting while Quentin kept his hands twisted in the sheets, or on Eliot’s skin, anything to do what he asked. There’s not much Q wouldn’t do, if he asked. 

Eliot lifts a hand, slowly, and brings it to rest against Q’s cheek. Quentin lets out a moan and turns his face into it, pushing his temple, his mouth against Eliot’s skin. 

‘Do you need me to help you?’ Eliot’s voice is soft, and he slides a hand across Quentin’s hand to circle his wrist again. ‘I could hold these for you. If you let me.’ 

Quentin feels his thighs twitch at that. Oh god, shouldn’t he be going soft now Eliot’s not jerking him off? Because Quentin isn’t. He _ really _isn’t. 

He looks at Eliot and sees how his pupils are blown and feels the slight tremor in the hand he has around Quentin’s wrist. 

Quentin could do this on his own. He could. But looking at Eliot, flying apart the way they both are, he doesn’t want to. 

Quentin nods. He offers his hands up in one fast movement, knuckles against Eliot’s chest, and waits, eyes on Eliot’s. 

Eliot’s been the calm voice in his ear until now, but Quentin watches him look between Quentin’s hands and his eyes, staggered and wordless. 

‘Quentin,’ Eliot’s voice is soft, wrecked, his eyes wide, his body deliberately held still. ‘Quentin -’ 

Eliot moves slowly, hands visible all the way, and takes Quentin’s wrists in his hands, then raises them to his mouth one by one to press a kiss against the soft skin on the underside of Quentin’s wrists. 

Quentin falls against him with a hot, fierce kind of relief, and Eliot wraps one hand around both his wrists. Eliot rubs a hand up Quentin’s arm, his back, and his neck, and Quentin leans into it. 

They breathe against each other for a long minute, and then Eliot says, ‘Q, Q, you’ve done enough, you’ve done so well, you’ve been so _ fucking good, _ hold on, I’m gonna -’

Eliot lets his hands go. He flutters a hand down against Quentin’s abdomen, then starts stroking him again, keeps talking to him. 

Quentin feels himself jerk up against Eliot like he’s touched an electric wire, because _ fuck, fuck yes. _

Eliot keeps stroking him and - thank _ fuck - _he starts to speed up. Quentin grinds his hips down and then unsure, he asks, surprised to hear how scratchy his own voice sounds, ‘Can I do that again?’

Eliot makes a broken sound, then, one that Quentin hasn’t heard before and kisses Q’s cheekbones, his jaw, quickly. ‘If you want to. If you want to-’’ 

So Quentin does. He’s caught between Eliot’s hard cock against his if he grinds down, and the tight heat of Eliot’s hand if he rocks up. He chases one sensation then the other, feeling Eliot’s voice, Eliot’s hands, Eliot’s shoulder against his until - ‘fuck, I’m close, I’m so close, El, _ please. _’

Eliot’s eyes flutter shut and he leans in, hand pressing gently on Q’s jaw again. He kisses the corner of Quentin’s mouth and says, ‘Come when you want.’

‘Fuck-’ Quentin says, and does, arching and letting out a moan, thighs burning under him and every nerve lighting up. 

Eliot strokes him through it and when Quentin feels himself unsteady, he realises Eliot’s gathering him up and pulling him into his arms. ‘Take a minute. Take a minute, come here, okay?’

Eventually Quentin feels his bones and nerves start to settle again, like a set of glasses in a minor shake. Except nothing - nothing - about what they did felt _ minor. _

‘Eliot, fuck, that was -’ Quentin shakes his head and tries to sit up to look Eliot in the eye. ‘That was so intense. That was _ so good - _’

Eliot is smiling full wattage now, looking at Q like he’s some kind of wonder, thumb drawn across his cheek like he did the first time they kissed. 

‘But-’ Q stops, takes Eliot’s hand. ‘What about you? What can I - I was going to -’

Eliot sits up and lifts Quentin’s hand. He says, ‘Can I -’ and Quentin says yes before he can finish the question. Eliot laughs and shakes his head. ‘Okay, feel-’ Eliot swallows and puts Q’s hand on the waistband of his boxers, and Quentin reaches in. 

Quentin looks at him with huge, huge eyes. Eliot’s _ so hard _. Eliot is - 

‘That turns you on. Me - doing what we -’

Eliot nods and reaches up with both hands to cup Q’s face. ‘There’s - there’s different ways to take care of people.’ He shifts so his dick is pressing against Q’s thigh. ‘You, trusting me - trusting me to have all of you, like that, to tell you what to do, to take care of you - to stop when -’ Eliot breaks off and surges up to kiss Quentin. 

Quentin remembers how much Eliot instantly, fully adored Mike. He remembers how they were all in, how everything in Eliot that was so ready to take care of people sat so close to the surface. 

And then Mike was_ gone _ , and Eliot wasn’t just grieving, he was unwilling to be handed fragile, important things. How he tried to hide how terrified he that he would let them down when everything went to shit _ . _How he didn’t use his powers in the cottage or around any of them for weeks, even though he’d never lost control, not once, since he was 14. 

Quentin thinks he might get what Eliot needs. 

Eliot pulls away and pulls Quentin close in a full body hug. ‘Q, if you pull my hair, unless I’m blowing you, it won’t do anything for me.’ Quentin nods and sits up so he can tuck Eliot’s face into his neck. ‘But pulling your hair, when you react like that? It’s - so fucking good, honestly, I nearly-’

‘Can I?’ Quentin pauses, then slides a hand back down and around Eliot’s cock, uses his other hand to find the lube again. 

Eliot gasps against him and keeps chanting, ‘Oh, shit, please, yes, keep going,’ against him. 

Quentin feels the thing that was worrying him settle all at once, like a spell building and releasing, like his anxiety meds kicking in on a bad day. 

He looks down at Eliot and asks, careful, ‘You like asking me to do things?’

Eliot groans and nods, forehead against Quentin’s collarbone. ‘El,’ Q starts, remembering how Eliot had used his name to clue him into questions and instructions, ‘El, what do you want me to do? I’m yours, I’m here, I’m right here-’

Eliot’s abs have started shaking, and his eyes are screwed shut, and he says, ‘Keep going, please. Can you keep going?’

Quentin does, adjusts his angle and strokes tighter, a little rougher, the way Eliot usually likes. Eliot yells and wraps an arm around Quentin’s opposite upper arm, and asks, ‘Keep going? Stay?’ 

Quentin says _ yes, _ and _ yes _ into Eliot’s mouth _ . _ Then Quentin plays a hunch. He runs his mouth down Eliot’s neck and feels him shudder under it. He brings his cheekbone up so he’s leaning on Eliot’s. He times it with a slightly harder stroke, and says, ‘El, you’re so good to me, you’re so good _ for _me, you’ve been so fucking good, you can stop-’ and it sends Eliot over the edge with a bitten off cry. 

\---

‘Okay, so Aftercare 101,’ Eliot says, when he’s doing more talking and less staring at Quentin and the ceiling with a huge grin on his face, and they’ve cleaned up the most basic possible amount. 

Quentin laughs. ‘Food, water-’

‘And check in,’ Eliot adds, determined. 

Quentin opens his mouth and closes it again. Eliot pokes him in the arm very gently. ‘Ask. This doesn’t work if we don’t ask.’

‘I always thought it had to be a - different thing. Aftercare. Safewords.’ Quentin doesn’t know what he’s asking, really, but he hasn’t gone wrong so far with giving Eliot everything and trusting him to find the question. ‘I loved what we did and meaner stuff is fine if it’s what people - but I’m not sure it’s what I -’ He stops and puts his hands on his face. 

‘Hey,’ Eliot says, gentle. ‘Food and water, then we’ll get into it, okay?’ 

He pulls Quentin’s hands down and then swings his legs over the side, and pulls Quentin up to standing. He tugs him down the corridor to the galley kitchen where the food and water live. 

Quentin waits until Eliot’s in the fridge, bending mostly in half to get to the low shelves, his back a gorgeous curve in the light flickering in from the narrow, curved hall. 

‘What else, Q?’

‘I didn’t think you could mess with- power like that - and be so _ nice _ about it?’ 

Quentin knows his voice trails off at the end and goes high and weird. He’s always known sex can get him out of his head so he looked into kink a while back in case it was the magic cure for his depression. Now, he thinks he must have misunderstood something (other than the concept of a _ magic cure for depression _) but given his state of mind at the time, that would track and then some. 

Eliot straightens up and looks at him. It’s a complicated look. 

‘Can I ask you a question you might not want to answer?’ Eliot steps towards him, a glass of water in his hand that Quentin takes and downs. 

‘Sure.’ 

‘Is there anything I need to know about your past experiences with sex, in case I -’ Eliot looks out of the window and back. He shifts a little, just a deliberate shift of his jaw and setting back his shoulders, and Q has some idea of what this is costing him to ask. ‘In case I make the wrong switches flip for you. If I’m - the leading dance partner.’

Quentin steps forward with an arm out and Eliot steps into it and holds on. 

‘Sorry, El,’ Quentin says softly, stroking his back. In the dark of the kitchen, just in his pyjamas, El seems younger and more fragile than Q’s seen him in a while, like what light there is might cut through both him and the shadows. 

‘Nothing like that. I looked into sex and kink a while back when I wasn’t - I wasn’t in a great place. I think it doesn’t help that I mostly found more hardcore stuff first - pain play and humiliation and -’ he bounces his forehead off El’s collarbone as softly as he knows how. ‘I think I wasn’t looking for it for the right reasons.’ Quentin forces himself to finish. Can’t talk about it, shouldn’t be trying it and all that. ‘Things that seemed like they’d push me further down. I didn’t know it could be like what we did.’ 

‘Tell me to fuck off if it’s not the day to answer,’ Eliot says, hand on the back of Q’s neck, ‘But why push you down? I think I get it, but it - it helps to know the patterns?’

‘Humiliation sounds like the shit voices in my head,’ Quentin says bluntly. He knows better than to think Eliot needs him to take the sting out of it. ‘Serious pain play is too much like-’ his hands flex a little and he thinks about the small, faded scars. ‘It’s too much like using cutting to self-medicate. Not a door I can safely walk past, never mind, like, open.’ 

Eliot nods, and holds him tighter, like it’s three months ago and Margo and Eliot are taking shifts by his bed again. Quentin can see the indexing and cataloguing. ‘What about being held down? We’ve done that before.’ 

‘I like that,’ Quentin answers, ‘I like being safe, and - contained? I like knowing what you want me to do.’ He pauses. ‘I like that you ask. That I can say yes or no, or pick an option from a limited set, even if I mostly just say yes when it’s you.’

‘Plenty to start with,’ Eliot says with a smile and a kiss, and swings his hand into Q’s and takes it. ‘We can work with that, or like, not. It doesn’t have to be an always thing. It doesn’t ever have to be more than what we just did.’ Eliot stops in the doorway and turns to Quentin with a frown. ‘You know that, right? We could never do any of this again, and I’d still -’ El looks away and back. ‘I’d still want you. I’d still really want you.’

Quentin feels the breath knocked out of him. He feels like they’re going off an edge, like that’s the start of a bigger conversation that they should probably have after some sleep. 

It’s just that he’s trying so hard not to have something so simple as hope, hope that Eliot doesn’t just mean the next two weeks before term starts again. 

‘What’s your - limits?’ Quentin tries the vocabulary as they head back to the bedroom and shake out the sheets, sitting chocolate and Pringles (‘ugh, crumbs.’ ‘Deal with it.’) on the bedside table. He thinks it’s fucked that he’s more fluent on his depression symptoms than how to navigate something that makes him happy. But he also knows they’re both capable of learning and extremely motivated to try. 

Eliot shakes his head and pushes a hand through his own messy hair, a corner of the duvet in his clenched hand. ‘I’m not sure yet. It’s -’ Eliot sighs and looks down, looking as tired as Quentin’s ever seen him. ‘I used to like so many things. Margo and I learned a lot, our first year. Before - Mike. I don’t know what’s - left. I don’t know what I want back.’

Quentin drops his part of the duvet and climbs onto his knees on the bed. He pulls Eliot in and sighs in relief when he feels Eliot’s arms go around him right back. 

‘You have to tell me, if it- the wrong switches, too,’ Quentin says, and tips them to the side to pile into the nest of sheets and Eliot picks up the thread again without being asked. Q’s proud of him for that. He remembers the months between Mike and the end of term’s deadly peril where El would take any way out of a hard conversation. 

‘Q, don’t ask me to - actually hurt you? Or pretend to?’ Eliot sounds quieter than Quentin’s ever heard, so he reels Eliot back in and tangles all of their limbs together like a Sharknado sequel title. ‘Like, what we’ve done with -’ Eliot presses a thumb into the soft part of Q’s arm, taps the spectacular mark on his neck that’s really showing up today. ‘That’s _ great _. But I don’t ever - want to hurt anybody else. Especially not you.’ 

‘Never,’ Quentin says, fierce, and kisses Eliot’s shoulder. ‘You don’t have to explain.’ 

\---

###  _fall:_ _spread patchwork counterpanes_

Kady opens the cottage door just as Penny’s about to knock on it. 

‘Hard nope, fuck no, and very no,’ Kady says. She grabs his arm and pulls him in a full one-eighty. 

‘What’s-’

‘Listen, I mean, _ listen,’ _Kady says and speeds up down the path. 

Penny’s eyes widen. ‘Yeah, no, this is even worse than our place. City?’ 

‘Yes, fuck. If I don’t get out of this fucking place-’

‘Yeah, what a good old banister, Q! Definitely nothing to do with -’ Todd comes out of the Cottage backwards, hands in the air, not blinking when Kady turns him around so he’s yelling at the path ahead. ‘Don’t tell Eliot or Margo I was here!’ 

‘Elliott.’ 

‘WHERE.’

Penny smacks a hand down on Todd’s shoulder. ‘Dude. We’re talking to you. That’s your name.’

Todd exhales. ‘Sorry, I just - there’s this whole thing with a banister that I definitely didn’t break, and - hey, are you heading -’

\---

Q is trying to tell some first years that everything is going to be okay without implying he might murder his good friend, Todd, when Margo comes down the stairs with steam like fast-melting ice _ literally _pouring from her ears, magically calls a glass to her hand, swears at it, and pours from a pre-prepared jug of iced coffee in the communal kitchen. She slams the fridge door so hard the magnet collection rattles. 

Quentin shoots Bex and Charlton a really hard do-not-move kind of look. 

Bex, bless her heart, says: ‘But you just said it was going to be okay,’ and well, Q tried, he really did. 

He sits back from the breakfast bar with his hands up in surrender and Margo rounds on them like an oncoming storm. 

‘I can get you a drink,’ Quentin tries after a beat of tense, death glare silence. He wishes, fervently, for Eliot. But Eliot has his own problems. 

Margo blinks and swallows the iced coffee in one long motion, then turns and pours the rest of the jug into the now-empty glass, freezing the base of it with one touch. Her shoulders are tense as she braces herself on the counter and points regally to the empty jug. 

‘This is too serious for anything less than champagne, which should tell all of you fuckfaces something really fucking eloquent. But you could refill that before I have my next scheduled screaming break.’ 

Quentin doesn’t take it personally anymore. From Margo right now, that’s practically ‘thank you.’ 

Bex and Charlton keep a merciful silence until Margo retreats safely upstairs, then they turn to Quentin, eyes huge. 

‘She didn’t kill you.’

‘Yeah, and what was your first mistake? Think about it,’ Q says and stands up to refill the coffee. He taps the square, tile magnets above his hip on the fridge until they’re in a bigger, aesthetically pleasing square while the coldbrew pour over fills up, and then taps it with a tight gesture to speed up the brewing process. It won’t be as good as bringing it in fresh from a square in Rome, but it’ll have to do. 

_ ‘But you said-’ _

‘Yeah, but didn’t like, the whole year above them die or some fuck?’ Charlton says. 

Quentin tries to summon a tiny bit of either Julia’s compassion-by-death-glare or Eliot’s outright hostility. He fails but at least he knows it. Charlton, somehow, had arrived at Brakebills not knowing how to use swear words, and they’re all trying to teach him. So far it’s been a long and mostly hilarious process. 

‘They went on spring break and two of them came back. The Cottage still gets postcards that stink of cheap cocktails from Josh.’

‘Oh, yeah, Eliot burned one with his eyes last week. It was really hot.’ Charlton’s eyes go misty and faraway. ‘Everybody talks about that one guy, with his good shit,’ he finishes, filling his bowl with somebody else’s cereal. 

‘So what you’re saying is that you don’t actually know if we’ll survive this,’ Bex says. Helpfully. ‘Because this didn’t happen last year.’ 

Quentin really cannot with this. For one thing, Eliot had totally been doing a spell behind his back, because he let go of Quentin’s hand to do it. And another thing, he just _ levitated it, _Alice burned it with her eyes-as-lasers trick. 

Having cool, attractive friends who cast collaboratively was such a fucking burden sometimes. 

He gets it, okay, he’s been feeling the anxiety in the air molecules, too, and everybody’s shielding has gone to shit so all of the psychics - even the ones who aren’t in third year - are more tense than normal. 

And yet. He sighs and pulls ice out of the freezer from the giant, ever-present party drawer. He mutters ‘fuck it’ and makes an extra jug for Eliot, like the excellent boyfriend he is trying to be. 

El is currently cosplaying a Dark Phoenix evolution by putting out a small electromagnetic storm of shitty feelings around his bedroom door upstairs. He’s probably hoping the drama will keep the first years at bay and impress them at the same time. (Quentin is neither impressed nor afraid. He is fine. He is definitely not 90% worried and a little bit fascinated.)

‘We’ll be fine,’ Quentin states firmly. ‘One more week of this and everything will go back to normal.’ 

Sex, Quentin’s brain supplies, instantly, like the traitor it is. He’ll get to have sex with his boyfriend again. Not that he’s focussing on that. 

Except Bex and Charlton are smirking at each other in a way that they probably think is mysterious and knowing, but is actually very first-year-at-Brakebills, and yikes, Q is just as bad as Eliot now. 

Charlton, ever unable to leave a single thing unsaid, asks, ‘So you’ll get to do the fuck with your boyfriend?’

Bex loses it and is hanging off the breakfast bar laughing, as Quentin leaves with a deep, long-suffering sigh. He feels about ninety years old. How is it possible he’s only been here one year more than them. There’s no way he was this - 

Okay, okay, he knows that’s bullshit and he was terrified more often than the current first years, even when nothing was trying to kill them all, but it’s nice to think it might be true in some reality. 

\---

Quentin runs an affectionate hand up the banister as he turns the corner onto the dorm floor. He ignores the really loud fucking on the floor above (wow, that will _ not _be helping El’s mood, he thinks). 

(He thinks, then he stops thinking. And he stares at his coffee offering, which is cold. He enjoys the very deliberate static in his head for a second, the static that is definitely not interested in that thought).

Apropos of fucking nothing, he remembers that Julia left a _ pine air freshener _ in the shape of a _ pine tree _ in his post cubbyhole last week. Julia is an awful best friend and Quentin will absolutely get his revenge. He resents the implication that he’s _ pining _after his boyfriend. The post-it note that said ‘sorry about his thesis’ was a particularly mean touch. 

Q sits the jug of coffee on the landing and lets out another deliberately weary sigh. Most of his class have either ended up in another discipline or failed out by now. Being one of the few remaining Physical Middle Children is hard work sometimes. Reassuring first years. Keeping high key stressed third years alive.

Casting silencing spells that anyone who made it _ this far _into the year should know already, so that everyone can move around without daytime sex shenanigans in their ears. 

He _ might _mutter some of that out loud. Fuckers. 

And _ another thing _. He nearly curls around the railing in remembered embarrassment. 

Eliot, like, found the pine disaster on the desk when he was trying to find a pen. He even _ believed Q _ when he said it came free with _ mumble-head-dip-how’s your thesis, _which was surely a sign of the end times. 

Quentin focuses very hard on the banister to pull himself back into the now. His therapist says he’s doing a lot better, and Q believes her, but he knows he’s still prone to thought spirals. 

Even if all they do is give wings and form to his most pissy, fixated thoughts rather than some of the darker destinations of the past, he likes having a bunch of options - magical and traditional - to stop the loops. 

Because Katherine, his therapist, is a Brakebills alumni, and said, with feeling, that her year ‘saw some fucked up shit, Quentin, that fucking school, I swear,’ they’ve had long chats about how Q’s magic can help or hinder his mental wellbeing. 

The banister has deep scratches in it from whatever the fuck the first years and Todd did at an unsupervised party last night but it’s mostly whole, with a broken chunk carefully balanced on the gap where it isn’t, almost like someone hoped Quentin would stumble on a broken thing and take pity on it. 

(Eliot calls the parties ‘unsupervised’ when the cottage has a party without him or Margo. Q did think that was excessive given how they’re all over 21._ And yet, _ this is how he’s spending the morning, _ Todd. _ ) 

He reaches his magic into it and feels the age of the wood that’s centuries older than him. 

The wood was a tree once. Which, _ yeah, _but it helps Q let go of some of the ball of worry and annoyance he’s been carrying around all morning. The tree doesn’t care about Quentin’s petty irritations and neither does the rail. 

He can’t do Margo and Eliot’s work for them, they don’t need that from him, and he can’t change time, even if they needed that from him, but he can do _ this. _

The wood remembers how to grow from its _ tree-forest-vertical _days. Quentin thinks about the shape of the veins in a leaf that’s held up to light. He thinks about sending magic down one vein, one branching fork at a time, until the skeletal outline of the structure glows, and when he opens his eyes all the ancient railing needs is a polish. 

Margo is leaning against the wall with a wide scarf wrapped around herself and giving him a faint smile. 

She’s also claimed one of his coffee jugs and shoved a chocolate straw in it while she watches him work. It’s half gone already. 

‘Thanks for helping me avoid the nerds, nerd.’ 

‘Um, how long- was I?’ Q winces as his legs creak under him, where he’s sitting on them, sort of, but also kind of on the stairs? Margo gives him a gentle but pissed off look. 

Q can get a bit lost in the mendings. 

There’s a whole rule about telling someone if he’s going to embark on a restoration project or a mending that might take a while. Or leaving a post it on the fridge with the time and an indication of his mental state on it so someone can figure out how long he’s been gone. _ We’re not short of fucking magnets, Q. We did a whole Grand Tour of magnet emporiums. _

This is a rule that Quentin just forgot for the sake of the banister, and because he was annoyed and saw something he could fix when he felt an anxiety spiral coming on. 

(Quentin has a brief flash of a memory of that one (1) time Alice and Eliot agreed on something, back in the early, horrid days before they sorted their shit out and made for themselves a terrifying friendship. 

Q had just found his discipline except he thought it was _ even more niche _, and that it was minor repair of books. The librarians descended on him like he was the answer to a prophecy and gave him piles of books to fix between classes - for practice, obviously. 

Alice and Eliot found out when he missed dinner for three nights in a row. They went on a frosty rampage that ended in them holding negotiations around a table under a dusty chandelier. Quentin then carefully agreed to _ work, for money, Q, dear gods _for the school library on a part-time basis and they dragged him out by hand.) 

Back in the Cottage, Margo offers a hand and an elegant, raised eyebrow. It’s #53, _ you’ve fucked up a little but I’m already over it. _‘Come on, up.’ 

Q takes her hand and stands. The ice in the other coffee has already melted and his legs are tingling from sitting. 

Margo taps the glass on Eliot’s jug and it frosts over, then kisses him on the cheek while gently pressing a nail into his arm. It’s a trick they’ve worked out to pull him back out of the object he’s fixing. 

‘Tell us next time. We’re never too busy to keep you here, dickhole.’ 

\--- 

Quentin heads to Eliot’s door. Or as close as he can get with all of the glass recycling _ hovering in the air around it _ like a debris field two full metres deep. Fuck, Eliot, other people - other _ Quentins _ \- live here too.

They bottles are rotating like a drunk solar system and each bottle has its own axis of rotation and trajectory. They’re freed from Earth’s gravity but they don’t seem to be moving in relation to each other, or a central object of heavier mass that Q can see, at all. The thought of mapping it makes his head hurt. But like, sudoku hurt, not migraine hurt. That’s nice. 

Quentin ducks under rum, which is orbiting scotch, and redirects pinot with a tap so it doesn’t collide with a handwritten red label he doesn’t get a chance to read. Wow, Eliot. Just: wow. 

He pulls himself up with his chest to the door and reaches up to knock it like he’s in Mission Impossible. 

‘El!’ 

‘Debauchery in progress!’ 

‘Let me in!’

‘Nudity, Coldwater! Orgies!’

_ Oh no, not nudity, _ Quentin thinks, drawing from a well of sarcasm miles deep and slapping his own face. He goes for the line with a higher probability of success than _ ‘literally all of my shit is in there with you.’ _

‘I have coffee!’ 

There’s silence and then the door opens. El is alone and clothed, like Quentin (mostly) left him. He’s wearing full brocade with a clashing, different brocade bathrobe and his curls are sticking up like he’s had his hands in them. 

It’s fucking adorable. Q feels like a floating bottle himself. 

Then Eliot looks at Q, the coffee, and the swirling bottles behind him in the dim hallway, drags Quentin in and slams the door behind him. 

Since they don't hear a massive crash, Q assumes he was right and the laser net of bottles that’s sprung up since Q went to supervise the clear up is deliberate. 

Q waits until Eliot is halfway through his second glass of iced coffee and produces a bottle of water from his back pocket. ‘Also this.’

Eliot gives him the giant eyes of betrayal and _ why has this befallen me, of all people. _ Q really would relent except he has definitely stopped falling for Eliot’s huge, liquid eyes. 

‘Traitor,’ Eliot mutters at him, but doesn’t loosen his _ don’t leave me _death grip on Q’s arm, and takes the water while Q stretches up a little to kiss his cheek. 

‘Yeah, because the bottle storm is really a great sign,’ Quentin shoots back, but there’s no bite to it. 

‘Just admit you liked it,’ Eliot replies, and sits the bottle on the nearest surface to pull him in and kiss him properly. ‘You love when I do magic like that.’ He taps Q’s temple and Q feels Eliot’s thumbs dig into his back a little, and the light is catching motes of dust like pale blue dots, and it’s all so nice, just the right kind of soft kiss and sharp thumbs, so nice that Q wants to tip Eliot back into the bed for the rest of the day. 

‘Hey, um, so,’ Quentin says, like this has only just occurred to him, pushing Eliot back a little while hating himself. If only they could do a thesis on fucking after days of _ not fucking _. The problem with their Giant Europe Sex Tour (...Margo, obviously) was that it had spoiled Quentin rotten, because how much he wanted to be in bed with Eliot constantly wasn’t dialling down much as the months passed. 

He tries for a big-eyed look of his own, the one Margo told him to deploy with care because _ unfortunately, he can't help but fucking indulge you when you try to be cute, Coldwater _. 

‘Have you seen the book I was reading last night?’ 

The _ don’t make me go back out there _is heavily implied. 

Eliot waves expansively to the sheer fucking chaos of his (their) abode and steps back, hands up with a wry, frustrated smile of his own. It looks like that bit in the Sword and the Stone when all the dishes and pans have been in the air, except they didn’t come down in neat self-cleaned piles so much as smashing everywhere. Quentin knows that Eliot has iron control of his telekinesis, so it’s all _ analogue _mess. 

‘Search. Plunder. I couldn’t possibly say.’ El pauses and rolls his eyes. ‘Please, take your time. To find your book.’

‘Thank you for inspiring fear and adoration in the first years, in equal measure,’ Quentin replies, voice dry. Eliot tries very hard not to look as pleased as he is and pulls Q back in to lean on him. 

They stand still, hands tight on each other’s arms, and Q can feel it, the charge in the air that would make it so fucking easy to pull Eliot down on top of him, or let Eliot push him against the door like he likes to. 

Q fights down the grin that’s trying to form on his face and forces himself to go to the wreckage of El’s bookshelf. El goes back towards the window seat with a frustrated noise and a quick, throw away gesture and then steps up via an invisible platform in mid-air . 

It _ twists _ Q’s stomach, the way all of Eliot’s casual displays of competency do. Quentin can only cast collaborative spells with Eliot if he doesn’t look at El’s hands. Which is, well. It’s not very fucking helpful, is it? 

Q picks out a beat up copy Popper’s exercises from between the boxes of ephemera that cover most of the bookshelves, with piles here and there of Q’s book collection, which is slowly migrating through to El’s room like everything else he owns. 

He finds his spare reading copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s _ Rendezvous With Rama _ where he left it on Eliot’s bedside table. He’s not intending to read the whole thing - fuck that _ weightless breasts _bullshit, frankly - but he wants to re-read Clarke’s descriptions of mechanics, then he’s onto a Sagan memoir (which is in the same spot in Margo’s room - sometimes Eliot falls asleep through there and Q just crawls in with them instead of trying to wake him up). 

There’s not much scope for minor mendings on electronics at Brakebills but Q wants to try it later. He’s getting more and more interested in reading about how the components of the physical universe fit together, and how the same patterns and combinations scale in mending magic. He's thinking about doing a thesis on liminality and microcosms. Or something. It's still a bit nebulous.

With a happy sigh, he dumps his entire body on Eliot's bed and rolls around on it until he’s in a nest of crumpled sheets and a blocky blanket. He lies on his stomach, head in a book, mismatching socks on Eliot’s pinstripe pillow, feet braced on the iron headboard. 

Eliot is watching him and clears his throat but doesn’t say anything.

‘Yeah? Plenty of room on the door, Jack.’

‘Oh, get behind me, foul fiend, I’ll stay on my perch,’ Eliot bites back but without heat. ‘Much as I’d love to, we both know I won’t be writing much about gravitational anomalies and telekinesis if I snuggle up to you on our bed.’

Q carefully doesn’t look up, feels the same smile threatening to break out on his face. He’s about to make a guess about which page to turn to and stops, then puts a hand on the cover and thinks, as clearly as he can, about the scene he wants to revisit. The book falls open to it and bumps his hand out of the way. He taps it back. He’s friendly like that. 

He opens Popper to the section on exercise 26 alongside it. 

Eliot calls 23-27 the jerk off section. If he needs to make Eliot laugh while he works through ‘citation bullshit’ like a cranky bear emerging from hibernation, holding up the line drawings from that section with a lewd eyebrow and slowly making the motion from the diagram is a good bet. 

After an hour of muttering and reading, El clears his throat and says: 

‘Don’t you have, like, actual work to do instead of lying there in attractive clothes?’

Quentin looks at his ripped t-shirt, faded pyjamas and mismatched socks. ‘El, I’m worried you’re lowering your standards here.’ 

‘Hey. I like that you’ve got the style of a woodland creature in knitwear.’ It’s annoyingly earnest. 

Quentin sends Eliot a look, but there’s a whole ‘Quentin as Etsy Boyfriends’ twitter thread that Julia did and Eliot art-directed to prove him wrong. 

‘You aren’t going to help the children clean up the party? Q, I’m impressed.’ 

Q flicks a page, impervious. ‘Bex and Charlton did that while I rolled my eyes at them. I fixed the banister before I came here.’ He blinks. ‘Oh yeah, they broke the banister last night. Todd had nothing to do with it. He said that very specifically,’ Quentin smiles innocently, watching a vein start to appear on Eliot’s forehead. 

Q doesn't mention that he also mended about eight glasses that morning, two of them favourites of Eliot's with satisfyingly heavy bases from the cocktail shelf. It would just stress him out. Also, forevermore, he’d pick them up and sigh about careless first years, and Quentin loves Eliot’s drama, but he just can’t deal with that until they stop inviting the thesis into bed with them. 

(Eliot can’t tell the difference. They’ve experimented. Not unless Q chooses to leave a mark to show that the glass was broken but it’s been fixed.) 

Eliot frowns slowly at the mention of the banister. ‘Fixed the -’ Eliot waves that off with a flash of utter irritation. ‘I do not have time for the antics of the youth. I didn’t ask.’ He pauses. ‘But it’s 300 year old wood. It survived wars. We haven’t broken it in two years of supervised parties. How did -’ 

‘Yeah,’ Quentin agrees slowly, eyes on his page. He’s going for casual and missing, but Eliot indulges him. ‘It was a real rager, apparently. Best not to ask.’ 

Eliot groans, hand to his forehead, faint against his window frame. He gives Q a look like he knows exactly what Quentin is doing and hates that it’s working. ‘We don’t call them ragers in this house. Don’t sicken me.’ 

There it is again, Quentin thinks. That thing in his stomach that doesn’t know where _ this house _ends and Margo and Eliot start. He’s not thinking about the end of the year. He can’t. Not while he’s in the room he forgot to leave at the end of summer, with as much of his shit in it as Eliot’s, with the wardrobe charms that have adopted his clothes with an air of pity as much as they joyfully organise Eliot’s shirts and vests. 

He looks at the page. _ No closed ecology can be one-hundred-per-cent efficient; there is always waste, loss - _

‘Think the professors are all focused on your year. They basically told us to take a reading week.’ 

‘It’s an injustice,’ Eliot replies harshly. ‘Those assholes. We did the befucked mid-terms five ever-fucking minutes ago. I tell you, Quentin, when it’s your-’

Eliot stops sharply, like the same reality that Quentin is studiously avoiding has caught up with him, too. 

Quentin rolls up onto his side and awaits the guilt-ridden, pithy reaction this topic usually elicits. Oh, this should be good. Maybe the daytime sex rule can take a day off, if the alternative is Eliot spiralling about the end of term and not doing his thesis anyway. 

‘-You should be fucking someone right now, Q. Drinking. Enjoying the last of your freedom before third year follies and footnotes destroy everything you thought you knew about yourself,’ Eliot rants. 

He couldn’t stop looking at Quentin before. Now he’s looking everywhere else, colour high on his cheeks, eyes darting fast. 

Maybe for the sake of somewhere else to look, Eliot puts two books side by side and draws a red line through the air with his fingertip to connect the paragraphs. He lifts the words up like removing a stencil and tosses them onto the sheet above with a flick that starts in his upturned thumb and ends with his pinky in the air. 

Q feels a sequence of complicated emotions before his brain catches up with the rest. ‘Fucking _ someone _ ,’ he says, voice heavy with _ fucking really, _‘and drinking.’ 

Eliot looks momentarily lost and then sharp. It’s familiar. 

Quentin feels tired like he’s walked out of a portal into a brick wall. Good thing he’s on a bed he likes a whole lot already, he thinks sharply, and the thought curls around his heart like a fist. 

‘How much do you have left to write today?’ Q asks mostly to move the conversation on. He wants to smooth it over. He wants to reach out and smooth his thumb across Eliot’s hand. He knows they’re going to have to talk about this, eventually, but - there’s the matter of the befucked thesis, the one Eliot might secretly actually care about. 

El doesn’t say anything but his shoulders lower very slightly. 

‘Enough that I promise to cook you endless actual breakfasts with poached eggs if you pick up one food delivery at the end of the Sea. This is an opportunity. You should be showering me with gratitude.’

Eliot will cook him breakfast anyway. He always does, and he brings it up to the bed often enough that Q is starting to feel like a spoiled boyfriend. 

Eliot did that even before they started going out, after he caught Q eating dry cereal two days after he moved into the cottage but before he met Mike. He had a habit of wandering into Q’s room, sometimes with Margo in tow, and nudging him over in Q’s bed ‘until whats-his-name from last night gets out of mine.’ Then they’d all eat breakfast off of one shared tray in soft pyjamas, and Quentin probably should have wondered about that earlier. 

Now, in his second year, they have sex and more obviously share a room. Very little else has actually changed. It settles the thing in Quentin’s chest that’s yelling about how much he could _ lose _to remember that. 

Q rolls onto his back and tries a smile at Eliot’s ceiling. It holds. 

‘I’ll go get that pizza from the Italian place in the city you like, yes.’ 

Eliot points to the magically-refilling jar where the muggle food money lives, like Q’s never done this before.

Eliot starts to say something and Q suddenly doesn’t want to hear it. He pulls himself up to sitting while Eliot keeps talking and says, over him, ‘I’ll ask Margo what she wants, obviously.’ 

Q leaves the book. 

Like always, he knows he’ll find it next time, safe on the bedside table, some random piece of paper carefully marking his place. The spine will be a little more creased from another, larger set of hands. That isn’t his business and it definitely doesn’t give him any_ feelings. _He definitely doesn’t make a note to accidentally leave a book more to Eliot’s taste later. 

He pushes himself off the bed and walks past the window seat. Eliot’s careful fingers find his wrist and pull him in, with exactly the right amount of pressure on his wrist to send warm sparks through Quentin’s body. 

Eliot tuck’s Q’s head against El’s exposed collarbone, with El’s warm hand on the back of his neck. 

Eliot’s hands don’t shake. They never do. He’ll voice things that sound like _ doubt _, but his hands are always sure and firm. Q wonders if he knows that, sometimes. If he’s counting on Quentin to listen to what he doesn’t say. Then: 

‘We’d be fucked without you, Q, never doubt it. Bring champagne for Margo?’ 

What the fuck is Quentin meant to say to that, when mostly he feels like Margo and Eliot are keeping his atoms inside his skin? He leans in and soaks it up for as long as he can instead. 

\---

Q gets twenty paces out of the portal with the tower of pizza boxes for Eliot, Julia, Margo, Alice, Todd and whoever is sitting around the main room in the Cottage. He’s carrying a canvas tote bag (‘[ LET’S GET ONE THING STRAIGHT - I’M NOT’ ](https://www.redbubble.com/people/riotcakes/works/23292461-lets-get-one-thing-straight-im-not-bisexual-version-lgbtq?p=tote-bag&size=small&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=g.pla+notset&country_code=GB&gclid=Cj0KCQjwoInnBRDDARIsANBVyAR33oLQnHxR3WXkADKnf-WuK_vd0XRL9ZiNW4HAt-56IKac-e3oLCsaAhe5EALw_wcB)) with three bottles of champagne in it. 

This is the problem with going to college in a magical pocket universe. Word gets out that you’re going for irl pizza for your boyfriend instead of working out your issues, and fucking everybody wants in.

The tote bag handles are the long ones, and they slip to the crook of his elbow to pull him off balance. He stops still - if he moves he’ll drop everything. 

_ ‘Shit.’ _

Penny and Kady appear from fucking nowhere behind him and applaud, which is generally how his nightmares went, sub-category: embarassing but not about death, for all of first year. Just his luck to come through the landing zone by the Sea at the same time. 

(Brakebills generally doesn’t care about portal etiquette but they are _ encouraged _to stick to certain basic landing zones for NYC portals and existing doorways for everything else. Something about preserving the space-time continuum. 

Quentin was listening except they were allowed to do _ portals _, and holy shit, his brain had to catch up with that first. It probably wasn’t important.)

Kady moves forward and braces a hand on the stack to save Q and the pizza. Penny does not help. 

‘Could you, maybe. Could you take the-’ Q tries to gesture to the bag with his entire face. Mistake. 

Penny continues not to help. Kady is trying not to laugh. A year ago, Quentin wouldn’t have been able to tell that. 

‘There’s extra pizzas,’ Q says earnestly and quickly, before they decide to just leave him to his fate. ‘I will absolutely hand them over if you get me back to the kitchen at the Cottage.’ 

‘Vegan, asshole,’ Penny says and leans on a tree. 

Except Q made that mistake in his first year and he has _ learned. _‘I got a spare vegan pizza, asshole. There’s a gluten-free one somewhere in case anybody needs that.’

Kady is looking between them and rolling her eyes. ‘Penny, I want pizza. Can you-’ 

Penny rolls up off the tree in that totally not hot way he has of - _ moving _and Quentin looks pretty much everywhere else as Penny gives him a look. 

Penny is objectively hot. Quentin is not the only person who thinks that. It’s a very normal thought. Quentin is definitely not getting wound up about literally everyone attractive while he and Eliot _ don’t have sex _during Thesis Times. 

‘Wow, cold shower for Coldw-’ 

‘I hate you, can we -’ 

Penny puts an arm on Q’s arm and takes all three of them to the Cottage. 

Kady walks up the stairs while Penny and Q put the pizza on the counter. ‘Thesis fuckers, pizza! Be grateful!’

Penny looks at Kady’s boots, visible on the stairs, like she’s the sun shining on a summer’s day. 

Quentin waits. He might or might not think a little tiny bit about the bassline from Welcome to New York, you know, the song by one Taylor Alison Swift, 1989 era. You know, it’s been waiting for you. Welcome to New York. Uh huh. 

Penny brings his hands up like he could angrily strangle Quentin, takes his box, and walks away. Q pets his own pizza box happily, like the shit he is. It’s the little things, really.

Nothing from upstairs. Q looks to Alice, who’s appeared quietly at his left and scared the shit out of him. Q hands her the box with her name on it and smiles. ‘They haven’t left their rooms?’

Alice shakes her head. ‘Not since you went out.’ She drops half of her pizza onto a plate and stands at the counter, picking up a slice delicately. Q has no idea how she makes eating a pizza with her hands look neat, but she does. 

He’s still fascinated by Alice, really, but it’s more about wanting to love and support her to kick ass from a friendly distance. Alice, thank God, felt the same about him and sooner. They’ve found some new common ground in detailed magic geekery about their disciplines and their school library jobs. (Not that Alice needs a job for money - library assistants get access to restricted areas.)

They leave books, references and notes outside each other’s doors - _ saw this spell, thought of you. Saw this book, one for you? _

‘Do you want to do the thing?’ 

Alice brightens and gives him such a look. _ ‘Yes.’ _

They abandon the pizza and go up the stairs where Kady was standing earlier. Eliot and Margo have rooms at each end, all the better to keep an eye on everyone else. And because they’re technically RAs this year, but the whole cottage knows they’d have more luck making a maintenance request directly to the TADA sign (or Quentin. Maintenance is, mostly, Quentin). 

Alice gives the closed doors a look and Quentin a grin, and then starts to build up the light in the thin gap between the doors and doorframes. 

Kady is on the stairs beneath them laughing and Penny, who likes Alice more openly than he tolerates Quentin, is visibly impressed. 

Q walks up to Eliot's door as he hears Margo yelling about killing them with axes. He dodges the recycling storm one more time and says quietly enough not to be heard down the hall, 'Hey, El, can you see the light? The light is pizza. Head towards the light.' 

Eliot pulls open the door, headphones around his neck and shirt-sleeves rolled up, and stares. 

\---

Okay, so in Eliot's defence - 

No, try that one more time. 

This is not-

Fuck. 

So Quentin is really fucking pretty, okay? And Eliot is very stressed. So you can imagine how difficult this is for him. 

He's not entirely sure he's still on this plane of existence after changing all of his referencing to Harvard days before submitting half his thesis to his advisor-mentor-never-on-campus-email-void. 

And Quentin is lovely, like, most of the time already, as Eliot has so much occasion to know. 

So stay with Eliot, here, for a second. He's been working on his thrice-bedamned thesis for like, a billion hours, and Q knocks with his nice, soothing voice, promising pizza, and Eliot opens the door, and - 

The Go Away bottles are made of glass, and Alice is sending light at them, and it's kind of - well, fucking _ magical _, really. 

If magic only ever did this sort of thing, Eliot would understand what Quentin and Julia love about it. 

The glass catches the lights and throws them around in pretty colours, and they all keep landing on Quentin, who's smiling up at him with liquid eyes in the warm, dim hall among the gentle lights, and -

Eliot remembers another time and place with a flash of heat that spikes through his entire body. It makes his stomach sink through several tectonic plates. He remembers disco lights in those colours on the water. He remembers Q’s face, watching them, watching Eliot, eyes bright and his grin wide as the warm firelights danced off his bare shoulders, Eliot’s hands tracing knots on his spine-

It's right then that Eliot realises he's utterly, utterly fucked. He knew when he was watching Quentin roll around his unmade bed, and thought, loudly, _ do that forever, please, I love you, thank you. _

But it’s like he knew oceans were made of water, and he’d seen one from a beach once, but now he’s being told the depth of the Mariana Trench and they’re putting him in a diving pod with an out-of-date manual. 

Q pokes him in the arm, face lively and shifting between different wattages of dimples. Yeah, right, responding. A thing people do. He can do that. Thesis 50% minus six days. Feelings later. He’s smart. He can do hard things. 

\---

Quentin is worried that he has broken Eliot. He’s in spinny wheel mode. Q pokes him in the arm. 

(The lights are cool. Alice and Eliot totally need to make this a collaborative spell they work on. Oh, hey, maybe if they break some of the used bottles and Q fixes them, but like, with the cracks showing, or fuses the glass into shapes-)

‘You and Alice should do this on purpose,’ Q says, waving to the lights and grinning up at Eliot. ‘It’s really cool.’

Eliot looks pole-axed. ‘Yes, more often, this - ha. Pizza?’ He comes back into focus and shakes his head as if to clear it. ‘Pizza. Onwards, Q!’

Q grabs Eliot’s hand and tugs. Eliot must be exhausted, because he goes without a comment or a fight for dominance, and the bottles drift back to earth in his wake. 

\---

Eliot sinks into the space everyone has left at Margo’s right, and hisses, _ ‘Help me.’ _

Quentin pats his arm and sinks into the seat they’ve all left at Margo’s left. Eliot sounds distressed. He wishes they were done with the hand ins already. He’s ready to have one of his best friends and his boyfriend back. 

Margo looks between them, and then at everybody else, and shakes her head. She meets Penny’s eyes and mouths _ yikes. _

Penny shakes his head into his own pizza. 

Q really feels like he’s missing something but he’s more focused on making sure Eliot eats something to notice. If he wakes up at 2am after five minutes of sleep, and Eliot is making some over-complicated stress bake featuring ricotta again, so help him - 

Julia shuts the door behind her and walks in to a chorus of sitcom hellos. She steals a slice of Quentin’s pizza, then drops another box on his lap from the kitchen while vocalising ‘HINT’ and sits on the floor opposite Kady. Kady shoves a box at Julia’s knee and says something too quiet for anybody else to hear, but it makes Julia laugh so Q’s happy. 

‘So talk thesis to me,’ Julia says with glowing eyes after she’s eaten a slice. ‘Gimme. I can’t believe I have to wait till the end of the year to clear my topic with Professor Li. You two get all the fun.’

Margo and Eliot sink into the sofa like figure skaters synchronising a move. It ends with Margo against Q’s chest. She pulls Eliot’s legs across them both so she can hug El’s knees. 

Julia sends Q a look that’s _ entirely _too fucking knowing. He tries to sink into the sofa to avoid it but Margo glares up at him and he stops. ‘You’re the structural integrity of this thing, Q. Stay where you are.’

Eliot pulls Q’s hand behind Margo and keeps it. ‘What Bambi said. You have multiple kinds of integrity.’

‘Fine,’ Julia says, undeterred by their disintegration. ‘I’ll get my kicks elsewhere. Please know I’m disappointed in your contribution to the academy tonight but that I-’ 

Margo throws the nearest pillow.

‘-support you!’

Eliot waves a hand to slow it down, then spends the next five minutes gently batting it off Julia’s shoulders with his brain. She ignores it completely and gets into knowledge transference through psychic means with Penny (_ ‘magic bluetooth for people!’). _

The whole shitshow that is their friend group drifts on around them, lacking a central gravitational mass or a trajectory. 

Q watches, happily, from the margins where Margo and Eliot have claimed him as a body pillow. He’s not worried about not taking part anymore. He’s usually got two people keeping him where he is, and that means he doesn’t have to. It’s not rude if he’s needed by someone else. 

It’s nice, as always, to watch Julia taking names at literally everything she does, even if that’s some complicated library serial numbers chat with Alice. It makes Q feel happy and relieved to watch Alice start out suspicious - but less so, every time - and end up scribbling on the same piece of paper as Julia while pointing at what Julia’s writing. It’s amusing as all hell to watch Penny and Kady get dragged into it against themselves, just like they keep showing up, and pretending it’s an accident. 

(He feels like the Sorting Hat would waver with Alice, between physical and knowledge. He feels like maybe knowledge is a kind of light. He feels quite tipsy on the bottle they’ve been passing between them on the couch.) 

Eliot tenses up under his hand like he’s just remembered something and twists so he’s got his (endless, _ fuck, _ how many days left? _ ) _ legs on the coffee table and his head on Margo’s shoulder. He bats a hand over at Quentin, as if he doesn’t already have all of Q’s attention anyway, and points at the mostly empty bottle. ‘Is this okay? With the new meds?’ 

Quentin truly appreciates that Eliot gives a shit about this. It’s not what he expected - and not how first year went - but it helps. It really fucking helps. He mirrors Eliot on Margo’s other shoulder as she looks down at him, assessing. 

‘It’s good,’ Q replies, quiet. ‘They’ve mostly settled. No headaches. Haven’t thrown up this week.’ He bites his lip and smiles at them with as much _ being a shit _ energy as he can bring. ‘Besides, the entire campus is tense as fuck this week for some reason.’

Margo swats his chest and he curls up into her, fake-wounded. Eliot kicks his shin softly but squeezes his shoulder. 

‘Yeah, Q,’ Margo says and rolls her eyes. ‘Shouldn’t that be like, making you feel worse? I came in here this morning and you were practically giving the first years affirmations to say in the mirror.’ 

Eliot laughs into the bottle and Q steals it back. The sofa feels massive, with them twisted around each other, and warm, and happy. He thinks this is what being on a boat might be like.

‘It’s like -’ he reaches his hands up to try to explain. 

Eliot claims one of his hands back from the air like it’s a balloon with the temerity to drift away and holds it tight. 

‘It’s like everybody’s on my wavelength and I know why. It’s like everybody’s depressed and anxious so I don’t need to explain - me. Campus radio tuned to depression station.’

They exchange a glance. Q knows it. It’s the _ is that a good thing _glance. 

‘I’m good,’ Q says, and pulls them in to prove it. ‘I like knowing how to help.’ He pauses and pushes on. ‘I’m worrying about stuff because it’s stuff. Not more than it is.’ 

Quentin knows he’s starting to get sleepy and vague but he doesn’t have the heart to move. He’s always the one to fall asleep first at gatherings and he doesn’t even mind. 

It’s hard to explain that it’s so much easier to sleep with the background noise and the warm bodies curled up around him. It’s hard to explain that if he goes upstairs to the dark and quiet of the bedroom without Eliot or Margo, he’ll be the most awake thing in the room for too long.

He thinks he’s either friends with smart people who notice things, or Julia told them to let him sleep when he was sleeping, no matter when or where they found him. It means she doesn’t have to come over and drag him under a table with a blanket so often. 

But he’s safe, and warm, and very close to sleep. 

He hears Eliot say to Margo, ‘Pass him here, it’ll be the-’

‘Banister, this morning,’ Margo finishes.

Q wants to protest that he’s awake but he can’t seem to open his eyes or work up the energy to protest. 

‘Time for my specialist subject, Sleepy Q,’ Eliot says in the distance of Quentin’s awareness. He doesn’t sound like he resents it. A hand smooths over his hair. ‘I’ve got this, Bambi.’ 

Margo laughs and says something quietly that Q doesn’t pick up. He feels her slip away off the couch then he feels firm forearms and hands pull him in. 

He hears Eliot, almost too quiet to be heard, mouth into his hair: ‘You know you don’t have to explain it, right? I hope you know that.’

\---

What they have, it’s so fucking hard won. 

They try to wear the year before lightly, but it’s always in the tightness of their grips on each other. It’s there in the way the rest of the Cottage gives them a wide berth as a group forged in something that burns the skin. 

The last year is stored away in Quentin’s box from his dad’s house and the number he knows he can call for treatment if it gets bad again. It's something they take out and dust off in the weekly session Q has of lie-on-Julia's bed in the airy knowledge loft and hug Julia, the one that's as much for Julia as it is him. 

It’s in Margo’s range of fabulous jeweled eye patches, it’s in Julia’s wordless check ins with Kady, who finally got to stay. It’s in the way Alice doesn’t walk by the fountain everyday, but she doesn’t _ not _ walk by it either, like she can’t bear to mark it off limits.

It’s in the way nobody offers Penny drugs at the supervised parties - on threat of one of them kicking the offending party out - or questions when he says he’s out, done with the crowd. 

The last year is still working its way through Eliot’s stiffest posture and how he gets loud and eccentric if both Margo and Q are away. They solved that the easy way; they’re never, ever both off campus at the same time, but they know better than to mention it or schedule it out loud in front of Eliot. 

It’s in the way so much of what they say comes down to: 

_ When did you last see- _

_ Hey, breakfast tomorrow? _

_ Did you eat yet? _

_ Here, drink water. _

_ Therapy today? Group, maybe. _

_ Fuck Fogg, if you need meds- _

_ Pizza run, bitches. _

They’re not all friends all the time. But they all keep coming back.

\---

Quentin wakes up halfway up the stairs when the banister hums a little in his awareness. 

He was mostly asleep, but the banister wants to say hello and thanks, so he reaches for it with a noise. 

Eliot stops and noses at the side of his head, amused. ‘Go to sleep, Q, it’ll be there in the morning and for a century after, thanks to you.’ 

Quentin looks down over Eliot’s elbow, blinking. ‘Are you - carrying me?’ 

Eliot laughs, cheeks a little bit red. ‘I was mostly _ levitating _you. Which is entirely different.’ 

‘Yeah, not romantic at all,’ Quentin says with a yawn and a slight arch, and curls back into Eliot’s chest, making absolutely no attempt to get down and walk up on his own. ‘I always did think getting carried was wasted on people who were too asleep to enjoy it.’ 

Eliot lets out a groan and pulls him in. ‘This will absolutely ruin my reputation, you know.’ 

Quentin huffs a laugh against Eliot and smiles up at him, sleepy and trailing a hand up the banister, then El’s arm. ‘We’d better go to bed. If it’s anything like the Ents, we could be here for hours just to say hello.’ 

‘Oh, god, why do I -’ Eliot pauses and takes in a sharp breath, then keeps going up the stairs with a thoughtless kiss against Q’s hair. Q makes a noise - he hates when Eliot cuts himself off like that, it usually means that it’s important - but Eliot shakes his head and tightens his grip. ‘I’ll tell you when you’re actually awake. You’ll have to get the doors - my hands are full.’ 

\---

###  _ spring: shore lights and i just might make it _

‘Dickwads, are you fucking?’

Quentin wakes up and turns over at Margo’s knock on the door. He has to gently pry Eliot’s hand off his ribs, but he manages to extricate himself eventually, and pulls on a pair of loose pyjamas on the way to the door. 

He doesn’t suppose Margo will care but there might be other physical kids in the hall and they’re all responsible elders nowadays - or cautionary tales, depending on who you ask. There’s probably nothing is on fire because Margo would have just walked in, because she’s got a tut sequence for Eliot’s wards. 

She looks deeply unsurprised that Q opens the door. Margo is leaning on the opposite wall and tapping a bare foot against the wooden floor. She’s lounging in a silk robe that probably cost more than Quentin’s wardrobe, in shorts, a vest and a silk eye patch.

Margo looks him up and down and snorts, and Q realises he’s in a pair of _ Eliot’s _pyjamas, hanging low off his hips and carrying on down over his toes. Quentin rolls his eyes but can’t help smiling, and gestures to the open door. Margo wanders in and Quentin tugs it behind her. 

‘We changed the sheets after,’ Quentin says, amused, as Margo throws the robe over the unused, overburdened desk chair and gets into the bed. Her eye patch is abandoned on the bedside table.

‘You know I don’t give a single fuck, Coldwater,’ comes the sleepy reply. 

Quentin drinks half a glass of water since he’s up and there’s a jug of it on the desk anyway, then gets back into bed. Margo’s put herself in the middle, and Eliot’s got an arm around her already. He’s tucked her in under his jaw so the back of her head leans against his chest, all without ever waking up. 

Margo opens her eye slowly and lets out an exhale that sounds a lot like relief. Quentin knows better than to ask what woke her up, and brought her to their door, but it’s not the first time. 

‘You know, I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t you with El,’ Margo says, and Quentin starts. 'Or maybe _ you _wouldn't. But not like this.'

‘Are you challenging me to a duel?’ Quentin replies with a slow smile. He’s on his side, facing Margo. 

There’s a couple of inches between them on the pillow they’re sharing. Margo’s done this enough to know Eliot hogs pillows but kicks off blankets; she’s tugged Eliot over her like a throw. Her grip is hard on the corner of Quentin’s pillow. Quentin doesn’t feel like fighting her for it when she’s left enough room for him too. 

Last time this happened, they had an awesome, fierce geek out about time loop parallels in the first and third Fillory books. That is, until Eliot woke up, pulled them both in with his Mr Fantastic arms, and said _ shhhh _while absently petting at their heads until they fell asleep, giggling. 

Q puts his hand in the small space between them, palm up and open. Margo tickles his palm so he’ll lean his head in and slips her hand into his, interlacing their fingers. Her grip is tight, but her face wouldn’t tell you so. 

‘You wanted to ask me. It was right -’ she boops his nose with a fingertip, then between his eyebrows, ‘there.’ 

He gives her that one with a nod. 

Margo shuffles so she’s flat on the bed, right side against Eliot and left side against Quentin. Quentin lifts an eyebrow and a hand. Margo tugs his left arm over her, then pulls Eliot’s across her stomach in the opposite direction. Her voice is raw.

‘I had this dream, Q, that he was dead, and that you and I fucking_ weren’t _. I can’t stop thinking about how I don’t know what the most fucked up thing about that is. I used to have it all the time, and I haven’t had it since I got back from-’ Margo cuts herself off.

Quentin swallows and grips Margo tighter. He knows she means last year. Usually Margo doesn’t come to their bed out of pain, not so obviously, but it’s almost a year to the day since things went from drama-shit to imminent-death shit, and they’re all thinking about it whether they want to or not. 

Quentin knows his chances of sleeping unmedicated this week are going to vary between bad and fucked. 

Any other week he’d get up and read if he couldn’t sleep. He’d have Eliot’s head in his lap. This week Q’s mostly staying awake to watch Eliot be alive next to him like a terrified boyfriend who’s lost him once already and can’t believe - or trust - his luck. It mostly gets him through. Looking at Margo, he supposes it could be a group activity.

‘Stay with us this week, all of it,’ Q offers. ‘Just- come here after dinner, curl up with us.’ 

Margo turns her head to fix him with a bright look at _ ‘us _,’ then reaches the hand that was on top of Eliot’s up to the headboard with a twist of her hand. Quentin lets out a soft groan against her shoulder. Of course, yesterday afternoon, they forgot to take down - 

‘This is just for show, you know,’ Margo says precisely, fingertips feeling the weight of the fabric tied to the bars between her thumb and fingers. ‘You could get out of any knot he puts in this whenever you wanted.’ 

‘Yeah, that’s what El said, but -’ Quentin looks up at Eliot, listens to his breath to check he’s properly, deeply asleep. (They both fake sleep sometimes. It’s a way to settle into the idea, and maybe turn it real. Sometimes they do it just to be shits.) ‘This week, we’re not doing - more than that. We’ve mostly not used much of anything.’

Margo nods, assessing. ‘He always did just have to ask. When it came to you.’ 

She taps him on the cheek with a resolute tilt to her jaw. ‘Q, do you know how many people on this planet I can stand for more than five minutes, never mind _ like? _’

Quentin huffs a laugh. It’s an answer and it isn’t, like so many of his conversations with Margo. He wonders when it got so easy to compare notes about ropes and ties with Margo. Probably around the weekend Margo took him shopping for sex toys and brunch_._ He wonders at the feeling, sometimes, that Margo and Eliot have let _him _into something, that they were the _us _first and now, in some vitally important ways, they’re a three. 

Q knows better than to think that just because they never fucked directly, and always shared a third, that they aren’t a huge part of each other’s whole lives, bedrooms included. 

‘I should thank you for teaching him knots,’ Quentin says. Margo grins, delighted, and Quentin feels like he’s passed a very gentle kind of test. 

‘Thank a glorious woman at Encanto Oculto, whose name I never learned, she literally whipped us both into shape,’ Margo reaches up with both hands and pulls the ties into the air with a quick tut. She taps them and the threads take on a pale, golden light. They float above the two of them like glow in the dark stars. 

Eliot shuffles down the bed without opening his eyes. He curls into a tight ball with his head on Margo’s stomach and both hands around her narrow waist.. 

Quentin looks, and looks, and _ looks. _Eliot’s face is softer and less sharp than it ever is when he’s awake, when he’s mercurial and full of fast-changing expressions. And Quentin loves him then, too. But there’s something about seeing him undone, unharmed and resting that makes Quentin weak and fierce all at once. 

He’d die to protect this, for the sensation of pushing his hand through Eliot’s hair in his sleep, to feel him push up into it with a muttered, sleepy, _ ‘Q _’ before settling back down. 

He’d do his best to _ live _one more day, through the worst of his bad days, for a chance to have this again, and he knows that’s not necessarily a good thing - that there’s so few supporting structures of a life that can withstand that kind of weight. 

He looks up and Margo is watching him, that assessing look back in her eye. 

‘I liked you,’ she says, ‘He liked you. And you liked us - not just, Eliot making cocktails, or me yanking some asshole’s balls, you liked us together, too. And I thought - he could work, he could _ stay _ without - fucking us up. Because I need him, Q.’ Margo’s eye is bright, expression deliberately neutral. ‘And I won’t apologise for being selfish about that. I could make a life without him, but I’m not fucking interested in that reality, you know?’

Quentin kisses the back of Margo’s hand. He knows. How he _ knows. _

‘The thing is, last year, we all had to fucking ovary up,’ Margo keeps going, and Quentin stays still and quiet. ‘And both my best friends nearly fucking died on me, like selfish pricks-’ Margo looks at him, arch. ‘And I was really fucking angry at you both for that, do you know that? I was angry at fucking all of it. My eye, what happened to Julia, angry at Mike when he was alive for not being good enough for Eliot, and then angrier at him when he was dead. You weren’t exempt. Nobody was.’

Quentin wishes he could sink into the bed and hide from the rage behind Margo’s look. ‘I - can’t blame you for that.’ 

‘No, you fucking can’t, you dicking shit, I lost my eye, and nearly losing you and Eliot in the same week fucked me up _ more, _’ Margo pushes his chest and then keeps her hand there. She looks down at Eliot, the neat scar across her closed, still-healing eye socket catching the light. 

Eliot’s breathing deep on her stomach with both of their hands on him, and sighs. ‘I used to not know how to stay mad at him - but it didn’t go away. He was so fucked up and he didn’t even care. He wouldn’t have understood what I was angry _ at, _and -’ 

At the end of term, Quentin had been alive, depressed and in mourning. But Eliot had been like a piece of glass with a fatal crack in it that hadn’t shattered yet, one that Quentin didn’t know how to repair. By then, Q was no longer in the business of air quote _ fixing _people, after all of the attempts to “fix” him and the others, and the idea filled him with a sick, roiling feeling in his gut at the thought, and his own past attempts. 

Quentin knows what Margo means, precisely, with a chill that runs through him down to the bones. He knows that Eliot would have taken Margo’s anger and used it to obliterate the last of what was left of his good intentions towards himself, to salt the earth and step onto a path that could have _ never _led to the three of them alive in bed a year later. 

‘But you fucking stayed, and you just fucking - _ loved him, _ and I didn’t see that coming.’ She looks at him, and Q sees Indiana, screaming matches, creative projects, and that first year that wasn’t his. ‘Nobody but me and him ever stayed before, do you hear me, Q? You let me go. I couldn’t have gone if he’d been fucking around Europe with anyone but you.’

He taps Margo’s hand. ‘He’s never blamed you for that. I’ve never felt-’ he rolls his eyes, his head around his shoulders, and tries to land on the right word. ‘- you didn’t abandon him. You didn’t-’

‘Burden you?’ Margo fills in. She’s looking at him in that frank way she does sometimes, when she’s about to calmly destroy one of his more dearly held delusions. 

Sure enough, she reaches up to hold his jaw to make sure he’s paying attention. ‘Sweetie, that’s kind of you, but I fucking did. I did it in the full knowledge that you would take all that weight El was carrying and say _ thank you, Margo, thank you for the opportunity _while it used up whatever you had left.’ 

Her voice turns tight, ‘I knew I’d never be what I am to El again if I _ didn’t go _. It was in me like a poison, but you were so fucking ready for him, as much as you were capable of wanting anything.’ Margo pauses and squeezes his hand. She exhales. ‘You should have been mad at me, Q. Eliot should have been mad at me. If anybody else did that to you, when you were like that, I’d kill them with my brain.'

She casts a look down at Eliot and Q gets it, feels the pattern slide into place. Margo isn't apologising, but she's hoping Eliot won't hold it against her either, the risk she took with both Q and El. 

‘You said you were in Ibiza,’ Quentin says slowly, like a question, piecing it together. He remembers Margo in Italy. The way she drank in Eliot laughing and eating gelato with her eye wide. The way she climbed into Q’s lap, hands tight on Quentin like she had to hold _ him _together, like relief and an apology.

‘I was in a desert, screaming my balls off. It got so bad I talked about _ nuance and representation in Fillory _ to hot knife makers and metal magicians.’ He play gasps and she pokes him in the arm. _ ‘Out loud.’ _

_ ‘No,’ _Quentin draws out, scandalised. 

She looks at him again, serious. ‘You know why I said that. He knows why I said that. I’d do it again, because it got us here.’

Ibiza was _ don’t follow me. Don’t try to find me, _ Quentin thinks. As clear as Margo could say it without saying it, which would have broken her in return. From some angles, it’s a cruel lie, but Quentin thinks that’s far too simple a critical analysis of _ anything _that happens between Margo and Eliot. 

Quentin doesn’t know what to say to that. It’s a complicated, profound kind of trust, and Quentin knows it isn’t _ entirely _for him. He’s the bluff letting El and Margo have a tricky, silent conversation. 

Eliot woke up slowly after he slid down the bed and he’s stayed still, listening since, breath even and deliberate. They’ll never talk about this again, any of them, even if they talk about Margo’s knife-maker. 

Q knows his job, sometimes, is to soften the blow. So he slides a hand into Eliot’s, feels him squeeze back _ hard _, and leans his head on Margo’s shoulder. He tells the room, as lightly as he can, ‘I like it here. I’m so fucking glad we got to be here.’ 

It lands. Both Margo and Eliot relax against him a little, and nobody sleeps, but they pretend. They settle into it and hang on. 

\---

Julia is meditating while lying horizontal in mid-air when Eliot knocks on her door and it falls open. ‘Come in.’

‘I can come back if you’re -’ Eliot stops and waves a hand at her. ‘Is this busy? I don’t know what this is. I fly for fun and vampire pranks.’

‘I’m only contemplating the great mysteries of the universe,’ Julia replies with a smile. She opens her eyes and falls back to the bed in a graceful unspooling. ‘It’ll keep. They’re eternal like that.’

Eliot ducks his head and pins his hands to his sides before they can get any ideas about _ fluttering _. ‘I don’t even know what I’m doing here.’

Julia smiles again, serene and indulging. Eliot wonders what he did to earn that, given all the time they spent spitting curses at each other the year before.

He knows it has nothing to do with that time he found her on a couch, flinching, and decided to sit at her feet until it was marginally better, because he knew how that went. He knows it has nothing to do with that because they had a screaming match about a magic map the very next day. 

‘Pull up the desk chair, feet on the bed, it won’t bite,’ Julia says after a moment, then reaches under the bed and comes up with a bottle of Scotch that she waves at him. 

Eliot lets out a breath, relieved and he does what he’s told for once. He looks at the label on the bottle, obviously. ‘Oh, okay, this I can do. Is this - ooh, very nice.’ 

‘So you’re in love with Quentin,’ Julia states, carefully timing it for when Eliot takes a drink, one that he tries very hard not to choke on. 

‘Excuse you- okay, fine, so what if I am?’ Eliot says, aims for arch and knowing. Ugh, _ knowledge students. _Did they have to be so all knowing?

Julia laughs and it sounds like utter delight. ‘Don’t worry, Eliot, I’m not going to _ tell him _.’ 

Eliot spins on the chair and dumps himself on to Julia’s bed, lingering interpersonal awkwardness forgotten in the face of his great and terrible despair, and the mortifying ordeal of being known. He holds his hand out for the bottle and Julia smacks it into his palm. 

‘Now _ that’s _ an eternal mystery of the universe, isn’t it?’

The sun is sinking through the window a couple of hours later when they’re comfortably flying at a tipsy altitude a metre off the bed. Penny and Kady wander in like they live there too. Which, looking at the size of the loft and its studio apartment furnishings and giant - seriously giant - bed, Eliot would have to belatedly conclude that they do. A conclusion he comes to as he falls down and off the bed. 

He’s not the only one to shack up by accident, it would seem. 

‘Oh no, we’re _ much _ smarter than you,’ Penny says, offering Julia a hand as she gracefully descends. Kady takes a drink of the Scotch and falls on the bed, boots still on. Penny continues, ‘We actually talked to each other last summer and made decisions based on information.’ 

‘The library _ likes _ Julia,’ Kady fills in, like that explains literally anything. 

‘It made me what I needed, which was a room big enough for three,’ Julia replies, and gets back on the bed to take Kady’s hand. 

Well, every day is a learning day, Eliot thinks, and wonders where Quentin and Margo are. If other people are getting drunk and clingy, he’d like to be drunk and clingy with Q or Margo, thank you. 

Penny sighs and offers Eliot a hand. ‘You walk back, you’ll get hit by a bike with a wicker basket on the front, with like, four fucking heavy library books in it, and we’ll have to explain why you have a shelfmark on your face to a sad otter gif. I can’t deal with that.’

Eliot feels a laugh bubble up. Sad otter. Ha. Q kind of is. 

‘That’s why I said it, one time offer about to expire, like my patience,’ Penny says and Julia giggles into Kady’s shoulder. Julia’s making exaggerated frowning faces and Kady’s nodding seriously, utterly charmed, but not, like, obvious about it. Eliot relates.

Eliot’s reaching up to take the lift offered when Julia smacks his hand down with newfound urgency, short nails pressing into his skin. ‘Eliot. Eliot. El.’

So _ that’s _where Q gets that delightful habit from. 

‘Julia. Jules. What,’ Eliot says back, pulling himself up to lean on his elbows at the side of the bed. 

‘It would make him so fucking happy if you told him,’ Julia says, eyes intent on his. 

Then she picks up his hand and pushes it against Penny’s before he can reply. 

Eliot has a moment of vertigo as the bed vanishes. He lands in their room in the Cottage on the rug in front of their bed (the rug that he didn’t buy). He’s looking up at the lamp (that they argued about in a secondhand shop). Quentin is sitting on the bed. He’s reading a book Eliot’s just started. 

Q says, ‘Oh, hey, Penny - is that -’ 

Penny holds up his hands - ‘drunk text for Coldwater’ - and blinks back out. 

Quentin sits the book aside, expression soft, and Eliot feels his heart jump at the sight of the receipt still, carefully, stuck inside it at chapter three. He rolls up to sitting, hands behind him like he’s lounging on a patch of grass somewhere. 

_ It would make him so fucking happy. _

‘Well, if we’re doing that,’ Quentin smiles, folds himself up to stand, then walks around the bed and sits down, cross-legged. It’s adorable. Eliot doesn’t know how or why, but he’d write chapters about it. He’d defend a thesis on it. ‘They kick you out of the loft?’ 

Eliot feels himself grinning. ‘Julia and I got drunk.’

Quentin’s eyes widen slightly. He’s got a hair tie on his wrist. His hair is floppy and lovely. ‘That’s - uh - that’s new.’ 

‘She says hi,’ Eliot says, swaying a little on his elbows, swaying closer to Q. ‘She says I love you.’

‘Aw,’ Quentin says, and shuffles closer to let El use his sturdy, neat chest like a supporting wall. If Eliot sighs happily, Quentin is too nice to mention it. ‘I’ll text her and say I love her too. Pretty sure she knows, though.’ 

Eliot’s glad of the support because he suddenly wants to use his hand to smack his face. It’s vitally important that he do that. 

Then he considers: maybe the universe is telling him to wait until he’s halfway sober for any grand declarations. To make them with a suitable sense of the dramatic nature of the occasion. 

‘Can’t say it often enough,’ he mutters into Quentin’s shoulder. Q pulls him up by the hand, and Eliot puts on a show of it while bracing himself with his telekinesis. 

He falls asleep with his head in Quentin’s lap, and Quentin reading aloud to him with a hand in his hair. 

\---

[0326]

Jules: remember when we weren’t talking last year

[0457]

Q: I try not to 

Q: and to grow as a person every day

[0902]

Jules: nice save

Q: thanks, you okay?

[0916]

Jules: i’m coming to the cottage for breakfast

Q: yeah i hear you got drunk with El, i’m going to need a recap

Jules: he can tell you himself when he’s less hungover

Q: he says he’s not hungover enough to watch either of us cook

Jules: thank god, i want my eggs poached, please

\---

‘They go already?’ 

‘Changed your mind at last?’ 

Quentin rolls his eyes at the ceiling and pointedly drops into the space next to Eliot to sling his legs into Eliot’s lap. ‘About dinner? Yes, I think we should go to that new Greek place you saw when we were at the antiques store.’

Eliot looks up from his notes and kisses him hard. ‘You’re an asshole. Go to Ibiza and fuck an entire orgy. Do it for me.’

Quentin raises an eyebrow. ‘I really don’t want to worry about Charlton and Bex like that. I’d spend the entire time bringing them water and snacks and you know it. They’re like, two years younger than us, but I’ve got this whole older sibling thing to preserve.’ 

Eliot snorts and lightly taps Q’s knee. ‘Q.’

‘No,’ Quentin says, mullish. ‘I’m not _ missing out, _Eliot. Stop having FOMO for me. Besides, in two months-’

Eliot clears his throat and raises a hand, wine and glasses flying to him. 

Quentin makes what he _ knows _to be a shithead of a face and raises his hands. ‘Are you going to drink or fuck me every time I try to have this conversation?’

‘Wow, the library is open tonight,’ Eliot snaps back and pours them both a glass, offering it to Quentin with a frankly excessive gesture. ‘Maybe I thought we’d both have an easier time talking about our feelings with a drink.’

Eliot says ‘talking about our feelings’ the same way most people say ‘mould’, but longer. 

Quentin takes the glass and sits it on the shelf behind the couch. He moves Eliot’s notes off his lap. He shoves Eliot back gently and climbs into his lap, straddling him. ‘Counter-offer. Talk, then we do some, like, seriously cathartic fucking. I’m thinking my hands on the headboard with the leather ties.’

Eliot tilts his head back and laughs, then leans his forehead against Quentin’s chest. ‘We’ve created a monster.’ 

‘Yep,’ Quentin agrees cheerfully. ‘I get like, half of the credit, though. And that wasn’t a yes.’ 

‘Yes, okay, yes, I’m in,’ Eliot reaches up and puts his hands on Quentin’s hips. ‘Okay, so I’ve been thinking about what to do for my postdoc, if I pass.’ 

It’s Quentin’s turn to groan up at the ceiling. ‘El. El. El. No.’

Eliot raises an eyebrow and opens his mouth, and Q shakes his head and covers his mouth with a hand. Eliot fucking licks it, because of course he does. Q doesn’t move. ‘Don’t even start with that bullshit, of course I think you _ could _ do it if you _ wanted to _, just like everything else, like, ever, but you don’t. You don’t. We’ve been over this. You don’t.’

Eliot bites his hand very gently and Quentin swallows. He takes his hand away in part because he talks easier if he can use it as punctuation. 

Eliot says, ‘And yet, I’ve got an offer.’

‘Yeah, but you don’t want to.’ Quentin shuffles in Eliot’s lap, sitting back on Eliot’s knees. ‘Sweetheart, you don’t fucking want to. And I’ve read your thesis, you’re going to fucking graduate with flying colours, and I think - El, I think you might need to accept that.’ 

Eliot smiles at him, and it’s the quiet, end of the world smile he had once upon a probability spell that always seemed to turn into death. 

‘Eliot,’ Quentin says, gentler this time, kissing El’s forehead. ‘Eliot. You can’t just _ not leave. _Seriously. Fucking hell, no.’

‘I’m seriously considering it,’ Eliot says, eyes closed against him. ‘All of these people want me to run clubs with them and open bars, Josh needs to stop giving out my email -’

‘- don’t forget the champagne company,’ Quentin breaks in, because it turns out a telekinetic with predictable, refined control and a great aesthetic has a lot of positive destinations. ‘Or the magic theatre company looking for an -’

‘-income stream by adding a cafe-slash-bar, and all of the bizarre non-alcoholic offers to use my telekinesis for the greater good and construction,’ Eliot finishes. He swallows and tightens his hands on Quentin. ‘Q, I just want to do this with you. And the cathartic fucking. Maybe forever. If you. Because- I love you?’ 

Quentin doesn’t know what to say to that. He can tell Eliot’s been trying to say it for weeks, that he probably had a whole thing planned and this exhausted confession isn’t it. 

He loves Eliot, obviously, but he thought they might go a lifetime happily without saying it. And he would have been fine with that. Genuinely, actually fine with it, because he knows Eliot loves him in every way that matters. But he can’t deny the way the words settle into his bones like a welcome weight.

‘I’d like that too, because I love you too,’ he says, quiet and sure and happy. He shifts his weight so he’s falling to the couch, El’s telekinesis catching him and letting him land softly. Eliot climbs on top of him in a rushed tangle of limbs and pins him down with a hug. ‘I really wanted to yell at you, asshole.’

‘God, me too, I was like _ this close _to breaking out some properly bitchy, spontaneous remarks that I’ve been preparing for weeks,’ Eliot replies. 

‘Is this about -’ Quentin puts a palm across the back of Eliot’s neck. They don’t talk about the stupid thing he almost, kind of did the year before, very often, mostly because it’s better for Quentin to have dealt with it and moved on. To focus on what’s good now. ‘Is this about me being okay without you and Margo around? Because -’ He stops and lets out a frustrated sound. 

They had a whole talk about looking after Quentin and _ you shouldn’t have to _ and _ my brain breaks sometimes. _

Eliot looks up - or mostly across - at him, from where his head is jammed in between Quentin’s neck and the couch. ‘Should it be?’ 

Quentin knows Eliot would stay if he said _ yes _ . He knows Eliot would stay if he said _ maybe _. He knows Eliot would drive him to that clinic if he asked and not just because Quentin can’t fucking drive. 

Just like he knows that he has a lot of options nowadays and El and Margo staying is just one of them. It’s not even the one that’s at the top of the list, because it would cost them all so much more than they think. Other support isn’t as exactly right as Quentin-living-with-Eliot, but it’s close enough to get through his last year at Brakebills, and Eliot _ needs _to go. 

‘Solid seven,’ Quentin answers in lieu of full sentences. The scale goes from zero up to ten, and it’s a way of Q assessing his own risk & pain that he can do and communicate even when his brain makes speaking hurt. 

They heard about it when they were researching sex and it didn’t work for them that way. But they used it next time Quentin had a really bad day, tapping out numbers against Eliot’s thigh every hour or so, tracing a route back up the scale skin-to-skin, and they’ve kept it for that since. Q leaves post its with numbers on them on the fridge before he sinks into a mending. 

Seven is - pretty great. It’s also not as rare as Q thought it might be. 

Eliot lets out a breath and says, ‘We’re going to need some more systems.’ 

Eliot sits up and braces his pointy fucking elbows on Q’s chest, gives him an arch look. ‘And who said it wasn’t about _ me _being okay without you? I know this isn’t my brand, so you know, don’t tell anyone, but it took all of us to survive last year. Is it really so weird that I’m pissed off about being told to go it alone in the next five minutes?’

Quentin pulls Eliot’s arms forward so he’s less spiky and more covering Quentin’s entire body, warm and everywhere. 

‘You’re not, idiot,’ Quentin says against Eliot’s mouth, ankles knocking against Eliot’s shins. ‘You’re really fucking not. You think we’re all going to disappear? Fuck that. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about dropping-’

Eliot crushes his mouth against Quentin’s and pushes up, hands sinking into the cushions when he tries to get a purchase. ‘No, fucking, _ no,’ _ Eliot says between hard kisses. ‘You - no. I was waiting for a bad, self-sacrificial idea and there it fucking is, right on time. _ No _ . _ ’ _

Quentin pushes him back. ‘You’re ready for it. Everything outside the wards. Remember last summer, when you didn’t want to be here for twelve hours in a row? It never went away. You’re, like, itching out of your skin unless you’re with - with me.’ 

‘And you’re desperate to write that thesis, don’t lie to me, you were sneaking in research breaks at winter break,’ Eliot shoots back, sitting back and then reeling him back in. ‘I’d be annoyed at getting thrown over for a book but I think they’re exclusive. You have to stay.’ 

‘I want both,’ Quentin says, voice hard and certain. He puts his hands on the sofa arm behind Eliot and climbs back into his lap. He feels greedy and he also feels like they are _ owed. _ They’re all of them _ owed. _He made some bad decisions - they all did - but fucking hell, they paid for them far more than they fucked up, and they had to figure out the mending of it on their own. 

‘I want you. I want the degree. _ Both. _I want you more, but if you insist -’ Quentin’s got his hands on the couch behind Eliot’s shoulders. He fixes Eliot in place with a look. ‘Make it work, Eliot. Figure it out. We’re magicians, for fuck’s sake.’

Eliot laughs. ‘God, you’re such a _ fucking brat.’ _ He rolls his eyes. ‘I suppose we could work something out with portals, since you like them so much.’ 

Quentin kisses him, slides his tongue in Eliot’s mouth and slows the kiss down until Eliot’s gasping against him. ‘Good idea. Portals do exist. Another, please.’

Eliot tugs his hair back to expose his throat and says against it. ‘I could move in with Margo?’ 

_ Yes, _ Quentin thinks, triumphant. _ Do that. _He’s been a steadying force Eliot needed this year; it seems right that Margo takes that place back when they live to see graduation. At least until they can both be there, sharing the work of sharing Eliot’s life again. 

_ ‘ _I’m thinking a tasteful loft with a bar and excellent wards.’

‘Great idea. New York real estate is your friend. Keep going. Work the problem.’ Quentin tries not to grin at the ceiling, hears his voice waver when Eliot takes him at his word and applies his mouth to Q’s throat diligently. Q pushes his legs further apart to let his weight rest on Eliot’s lap more fully, feels Eliot getting hard against him. 

‘Weekends,’ Eliot gasps out, ‘You could - write at ours. I could - visit. A night a week.’ 

‘Good plan. I’m keeping your room anyway,’ Quentin says, and takes two of Eliot’s fingers into his mouth, then lets them go with a pop while Eliot shifts under him, breathing hard. 

‘It _ is _ your room. Your _ old _room is our closet for shit that we don’t like,’ Eliot says absently, thumb on Quentin’s bottom lip, where his eyes are resting, too. 

‘Almost like we already live together,’ Quentin nudges him with his nose. ‘You’re such a problem-solver, you know.’ 

‘Firstly, fuck you -’

‘In a minute,’ Quentin says precisely and gently bites his earlobe. 

_ ‘Quentin.’ _

‘Somebody needs to bring me thesis pizza if I’m tied up,’ Quentin says and starts on Eliot’s shirt buttons to prove the point, and Eliot mouths _ tied up _silently with a gloriously turned on, glassy look, tightens his hands around Quentin and leans forward. ‘Any other business?’

‘Are _ you _ giving me consent to work out _ my _ feelings with you _ ?’ _Eliot’s voice goes high, delighted, and Quentin tries not to grin and fails. 

‘Is it _ working?’ _Quentin mimics, right back at him, grinds down again, and Eliot groans. 

Quentin holds his hands up and clasps them behind his back slowly, tilts his head like _ what are you going to do about it. _

‘Don't stop. It’s making me want to fuck you like, right now,’ Eliot answers, leaning back and just _ looking _at him. ‘But also do that like, all the time, in a bed we both own. You’re a fucking menace, Coldwater. I want to speak to the manager.’ 

Quentin laughs and noses against his jaw. ‘I’ve got some bad news for you. You are the manager. You’re going to be spectacular at it.’

Eliot reaches his hands behind Quentin’s back to feel where Quentin’s got his hand wrapped around his other wrist. He leans forward and covers Q’s hands with his own. He’s looking between Quentin’s eyes and his arms with something like disbelief, but softer. 

‘In a year -’ Eliot looks at him, turning serious, and Quentin lifts his head, determined. ‘In a year, if you wanted, you could move back in with us -’ Eliot stops and looks up at him, and Quentin remembers, _ I could hold those for you. If you let me. _

‘Yes,’ Quentin answers, when Eliot stops. He brings his hands up slowly, visible all the way, and offers them to Eliot, palm up. ‘It’s a yes.’ 

END 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! This was, ironically, the first thing I wrote in this fandom back in April, but I haven't posted because I kept tweaking it and putting it off. 
> 
> soundtrack
> 
> you were a kindness, the national  
delicate, taylor swift  
animal, troye sivan  
heart hope, oh wonder  
slow show, the national
> 
> titles
> 
> ‘call me friend but keep me closer’ from ‘when the party’s over’ by billie eilish.   
‘spread patchwork counterpanes’ from the poem ‘Plum’ by Gillian Clarke.   
‘shore lights and I just might make it’ from ‘Let Go’ by Banners. 
> 
> This had the working title ‘some call me by your name bullshit’ for a long time. Now the title is an extremely obvious Taylor Swift reference, because Q. 
> 
> I yell about the Magicians on tumblr as[ timelykey](https://timelykey.tumblr.com).


End file.
